An agent-based negotiation protocol for supply chain finance

Supply chain finance (SCF) makes it possible to discover and utilize optimization potentials concerning the financial flows of a supply chain. A key feature of SCF is the provision of financial support based on a core business that extends good credit to upstream and downstream businesses and facilitates lending without taking unacceptable risks. To this end, a multi-agent system (MAS) approach is proposed to automate and facilitate the process of selecting the best possible financing options in the supply chain. It must be decided whether internal or external financing is to be used and which internal player offers the most favourable financing option. This second decision-making problem is realized in the MAS by an automated negotiation process in the form of an auction. The model considers the information asymmetry between external and internal supply chain actors and additional external effects for internal supply chain actors while taking over financing. Numerical experiments show the functionality and advantages of the specially designed negotiation protocol.