Automating supply chain negotiations using autonomous agents: a case study in transportation logistics

This paper presents a case study for the application of agent-mediated negotiation techniques in transportation logistics. More specifically, we consider the interaction between several logistics service providers negotiating over the allocation of transportation orders. In this context, we show that automated negotiation techniques (especially multi-issue or multi-item negotiation) can bring significant advantages, by allowing parties to discover jointly profitable bundles (allocations) of orders. The model, evaluations and results reported in this paper concern the business processes of Vos Logistics, one of the largest European transportation logistic providers