An Agent-based Integrated Negotiation Framework of Material Procurement for Lean Construction Material Delivery

A framework is proposed, which integrated the short-term dynamic project schedule and the lean construction material delivery and serves as the communication channel, connecting the project schedule and the material delivery online. The framework includes two aspects: one is about the short-term dynamic project schedule; the second is about the lean construction material delivery according to the short-term dynamic project schedule. To the first aspect, we apply the agent- based compensatory negotiation method to enable the short-term dynamic project schedule. To the second aspect, we study how to take advantage of the e-commerce technology and the agent negotiation technical to attack it. Specially, we put more attention to the material procurement for short-term project dynamic schedule, under the e-commerce environment, which is used to support lean material delivery for lean construction, and an agent-based multi-issue automated negotiation framework is given to improve negotiation efficiency and effectiveness, where a contractor negotiates with many suppliers individually in a bilateral fashion. The agent-based negotiation framework integrates the multi-attribute utility theory and integrative negotiation to suggest better deals with higher joint payoff. Since contractor´s negotiation with many suppliers simultaneously, a number of negotiation threads work at the same time and mutually influence each other, we introduce commitment mechanism to permit both sides reneging their commitments by paying penalty fee, so that both sides can select the best deal, this is important and more practical in real construction material procurement cases.