面對全球化的競爭環境，企業已經無法經由單打獨鬥來提升競爭優勢，必須透過與其他供應鏈成員間彼此分享資訊、合作協調，來提升整體供應鏈的效能。在這樣一個分散式的供應鏈結構中，企業之間如何合作無間、快速協調來完成顧客的訂單是一個重要的議題。本論文在設計一個快速、彈性的方法來解決供應鏈上排程衝突問題。

在現實環境中，由於涉及到公司的商業機密及需要高額的資訊收集成本，因此，利用集中式的方法來解決分散式排程問題是不實際也不可行的。另外，分散限制滿足方法只著重在尋找一個可執行的訂單排程。因此，我們提出一個以多重代理人為基礎的分散式協同機制，此方法利用協商機制及基因演算法來解決供應鏈分散式排程問題。本論文以模具產業的供應鏈為例，以及設計了數個實驗去分析這三個方法的效率及供應鏈效能。實驗結果顯示利用分散式協同機制來解決供應鏈上排程衝突問題是可行的。

Facing global and dynamic competition environment, companies have to collaborate with other companies instead of struggle alone to optimize performance of supply chain. In a distributed supply chain structure, it is an important issue for companies to coordinate seamlessly to effectively fulfill customer orders. In this thesis, we seek to propose a fast and flexible method to solve the order fulfillment scheduling conflicts among partners in a supply chain.

Due to the risk of exposing trade secrets and the cost of gathering information, the centralized constraint satisfaction mechanism is infeasible to handle distributed scheduling problem in real world environment. Moreover, the distributed constraints satisfaction model just focuses on finding a globally executable order fulfillment schedule. Therefore, we propose an agent-based distributed coordination mechanism that integrates negotiation with generic algorithm. We chose the mold manufacturing industry as an example and conducted experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism and to compare with other benchmark methods proposed by researchers prior to this study. The experimental results indicate that the distributed coordination mechanism we proposed is a feasible approach to solve the order fulfillment scheduling conflicts in outsourcing activities in a supply chain.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 RESEARCH MOTIVATION 1
1.2 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 2
1.3 THESIS ORGANIZATION 3
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 5
2.1 SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT 5
2.1.1 The Definition Supply Chain and Supply Chain Management 5
2.1.2 Main Problems in Supply Chain and the Causes of Formation for Supply Chain Problems 5
2.1.3 Techniques for Information Sharing 6
2.2 MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM 8
2.2.1 The Definition and Characteristics of Agents 8
2.2.2 The Definition and Characteristics of Multi-Agent System 9
2.2.3 Applications of Agent Technology 9
2.2.4 Multi-Agent System Platform: JADE 10
2.3 DISTRIBUTED CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION PROBLEM 10
2.3.1 Constraint Satisfaction Problem 11
2.3.2 Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem 11
2.3.3 Algorithms for Solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem 12
2.3.4 Distributed Scheduling Problem Is Formulated as Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem 15
2.4 AUTOMATED NEGOTIATION 17
2.4.1 The Definition and Process of Negotiation 17
2.4.2 Negotiation Mechanisms 18
2.5 GENETIC ALGORITHM 20
CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH FRAMEWORK 27
3.1 DISTRIBUTED CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION MODEL 28
3.1.1 Task Representations: TÆMS Task Models 30
3.1.2 Constraints Satisfaction Solution 31
3.2 DISTRIBUTED COORDINATION MECHANISM INTEGRATING NEGOTIATION WITH GENETIC ALGORITHM 32
3.2.1 One-to-Many Multi-Attribute Negotiation 32
3.2.2 Multi-Attribute Proposal/Counter Proposal Evaluation 39
3.2.3 Acceptability Criteria of Multi-Attribute Proposal/Counter Proposal 39
3.2.4 Multi-Attribute Counter Proposal/New Proposal Generation 40
3.3 THE BACKGROUND AND CHARACTERISTICS OF MOLD INDUSTRY 47
CHAPTER 4 EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN 48
4.1 EXPERIMENTAL SETTINGS 48
4.2 EXPERIMENTS 52
4.2.1 Experiment A 53
4.2.2 Experiment B 56
4.2.3 Experiment C 56
CHAPTER 5 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 58
5.1 EFFECTS OF DISTRIBUTED CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION AND DISTRIBUTED COORDINATION METHODS ON SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE 58
5.1.1 Experiment A-1 58
5.1.2 Experiment A-2 60
5.1.3 Experiment A-3 61
5.1.4 Experiment A-4 62
5.1.5 Comparison with experiment A-1, A-2, A-3 and A-4 64
5.1.6 Summary 67
5.2 EFFICIENCY OF DISTRIBUTED CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION AND DISTRIBUTED COORDINATION METHODS 68
5.3 PERFORMANCE AND EFFICIENCY OF DISTRIBUTED COORDINATION MECHANISM WITH DIFFERENT COMPOSITIONS OF BARGAINING POWER 73
CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS 75
6.1 CONCLUSIONS 75
6.2 FUTURE WORKS 76
REFERENCES 75

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