Negotiation System for Virtual Enterprises

This paper will present the concept of a very new and high sophisticated system for manual and automatic negotiation. Started in '98 an european consortium provided the Esprit project "MUSSELS" (Multi Stage Enterprises Logistic Control System), developed a new approach to meet requirements of enterprise networks. Within this consortium Fraunhofer IPA took the part of developing a Logistic Chain Analyser (LCA) to control the logistic between the enterprises on a strategic level. LCA mainly consists of a module to forecast market demand, available capacity, a module to handle Communication and data management, a module to evaluate the performance of the network and a negotiation system. In view of the large amount of negotiations in a network, the negotiation system was designed to operate in a manual and automatic mode. The manual mode for critical or new situations, the automatic mode for routine jobs. In case of huge enterprise networks, with several companies offering substituting products a concept of "Negotiation Optimisation with Genetic Algorithms" was worked out. An enterprise network in the plastic manufacturing industry will be the pilot to prove the high efficiency of the LCA in a network environment, exploiting the potentials of frequent and accurate negotations in a - now - feasible way