A Study on the Formation of Virtual Enterprise under Global Manufacturing Environment

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We presume in this study that a virtual enterprise will be formed by selecting members applied for a supply chain of a product. We postulated two models in the below to form a VE which will be characterized by the existence of a leader in the supply chain to reach the mutual agreement or consensus.1. The consensus is attained in the negotiation process to select members from the sales agent to the agents in the market at the upstream of the supply chain.2. A leader governing the supply chain will select the members from the market.We studied mainly on the first model from the view points such as what kind of information or proposal to be made by an agent for negotiation or to be selected as a member of the supply chain, how to select members from the applicants based on the information provided and so on. The major results obtained are as follows :1. Development of a model reaching to the consensus for a virtual enterprise.A model is developed such that the members are determined from … More the downstream to the upstream of the supply chain. The protocol for the negotiation is a contract protocol based on the auction among the agents and the market characteristics are represented ay the timings to make a bid to the downstream and a proposal to the upstream.2. An analysis of the negotiation process with various strategies for bidding.We consider two types of agents in the market ; one with a strategy to pursue the profit and the other to prefer the reduction of inventory. The relation between the strategy of the agents and the characteristics of the resulting virtual enterprise was investigated by simulating various models with agents taking different strategies, clarifying interesting characteristics of VE and results. The measures observed were the profit, the return of asset and the effect on the inventory. We also considered two negotiation processes to determine the members from the down stream first and the up stream first by changing the timing for bidding and distributing proposals. Less