E-Procurement Process: Negotiation and Auction Approaches for SMEs

E-procurement transactions in Business to Business (B2B) environment showed a constant and positive trend in the last years. The most popular methodologies to support these tools are all related to dedicated protocols able to facilitate the agreements among customers and suppliers. This chapter proposes a Multi Agent Architecture integrated with several multi-attribute auction mechanisms specifically designed to support the e-procurement processes. Moreover, differently from other cases proposed in literature, the suppliers’ proposal formulation is strongly influenced by their production plans. A simulative environment has been developed in order to evaluate different performances: the customer and suppliers’ utilities, the profit distribution among the involved agents and the time necessary to reach an agreement. The mentioned approaches are compared with a negotiation process. The simulation results highlight the weakness and strength points of each auction protocol and why they can be considered as a relevant tool in B2B environments.