Improved E-sourcing Strategy with Multi-agent Swarms

The research results reported in this paper mainly relate to the well-known limitations of e-sourcing, i.e. the difficulties and restrictions in browsing thousands globally operating e-marketplaces, differences between the requirements of a potential participant for buying purposes and those of the organizations seeking participation as suppliers, growing competitiveness and the changeability of the demands at e-marketplaces. Combining agent technology with bee strategy offers a solution, as suggested in the paper. The behavior of bees, which cope with the management of limited resources in an unpredictable and constantly changing environment seems applicable to e-sourcing. This expands the present opportunities offered by e-marketplaces. The main contribution of this paper is an adaptation of the Polymorphic Self-Slimming Agent (PSA) model to the e-sourcing platform, which is based on the bees strategy. This combination shows how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) can significantly increase resources acquisition and search of potential suppliers.