An agent based approach for exception handling in e-procurement management

E-procurement has become an important function of enterprise information systems. The process of e-procurement includes the automatic definition of product requirements, search and selection for suppliers, negotiation and contracting with suppliers. However, the adoption of e-procurement encounters various exceptions from internal and external environments such as sharply increased demand, delivery delay and inventory failure. In this paper, we have proposed an agent and Web service based architecture for exception handling in e-procurement. Agent technology is applied to deal with the complex, dynamic, and distributed e-procurement process, while Web service technology is applied to provide scalability and interoperability. In this architecture, different tasks in the e-procurement process, such as searching, negotiating, supplier selection, contracting, monitoring, and exception handling, are assigned to different agents, which are wrapped as Web services. A set of rules for detecting and handling the exceptions is defined based on a basic inventory model and a genetic algorithm is utilized for supplier selection. To evaluate our exception handling approach, we have developed a prototype system, through which a simulation has been conducted to verify the effectiveness of our approach. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.