![](bg6.png)
fairly distributes the requested quantities trying to
avoid to each partner a procurement phase. Each
supply chain manager adopts the well known
crossed matrix (or ABC) criteria based on the
Pareto’s law in order to decide the optimal
procurement point, e.g., List 2 shows that the Acer
LCD display belongs to the class AA of the crossed-
matrix.
5 RELATED WORK AND
CONCLUSIONS
Recent contributions to the VE’s supply chain
modelling come from the promising area of multi-
agent systems, e.g., (Jennings et al., 2000; Pathak et
al., 2000; Petersen et al., 2000).
In (Pathak et al., 2000) the authors describe how
to model a supply chain scenario exploiting both the
ZEUS Agent Building toolkit and the Generic
Modeling Environment (GME). Such tools are able
to deal with the problem analysis, the problem
design, and the application realization phases.
Moreover, they explain how to use the tools to
define the agent properties (e.g., ontology, tasks,
communication protocols) focusing more on agent
modelling issues rather than on the agent
coordination. Despite of they recognize the
remarkable aspect that agents are often not perfectly
rational and fully informed about the world in which
they work; they do not characterize any agent roles
to overcome such limitations. The AGORA multi
agent architecture, described in (Petersen et al.,
2000), aims to model functional aspects and the life-
cycle of a virtual enterprise. The authors consider a
homogeneous environment composed of enterprises,
which use the same AGORA system, able to form
temporary coalitions (VEs). That is, they do not deal
with enterprise information systems heterogeneity.
Furthermore, such a system can not model a peer-to-
peer scenario characterized by autonomous entities
(peers) free to interact each other without to a priori
build up a central authority, i.e., an AGORA’s
instance, that control their communications.
Probably one of the most complete and flexible
agent-based approaches to model and build process
management systems has been realized inside the
ADEPT project (Jennings et al., 2000). For instance,
ADEPT allows designers for dynamic, distributed,
and unpredictable processes, besides, it is able to
manage multiple (even though decentralized)
organizations that concurrently participate to a given
process. The authors detail their system architecture
and functionalities, but no examples are given about
how to configure each agent’s role into a real world
scenario, e.g., VE’s supply chain scenario.
Thus, our paper presents and describes an agent-
based framework prototype, required to cope as
automatically as possible with virtual enterprise’s
supply chain management coordination issues. That
is, each peer (person/organization) has an (software)
agent platform that manages the peer’s participation
in the P2P coalition (virtual-enterprise). As far as we
know, the results of the architectural design analysis
in terms of agents’ roles, needed to effectively deal
with the inherently interaction relationships of a
supply chain scenario, is quite original.
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