Development of an agent-based negotiation model for buyer-supplier relationship with multiple deliveries

In the recent decade, the relationship between supplier and buyer has transferred from trade-off relationship to coordination relationship. Many researches focuses on finding overall maximal profit between supplier and buyer, but their shortage is assuming that either supplier or buyer knows his opponent´s complete information. Actually, it is not true, and enterprises usually reach agreements via negotiation. This study develops an agent-based negotiation model between buyer and supplier with consideration of multiple deliveries. It is a nonlinear problem with multiple decision variables; thus, we use objective programming to resolve it. In example illustration, we use negotiation thread and the difference between joint total cost and minimum joint total cost to measure negotiation result. In addition, an ANOVA analysis is performed to discuss the influence of negotiation parameters on negotiation performance. We believe that the results of this study can serve as a tool for facilitating the practice.