Intelligent Trading Networks: Peer-to-Peer Trading in a Distribution Marketplace
Bruce M. McLaren, Philip J. Hayes, Aidan J. McKenna · 2003
Abstract. We have developed an intelligent, peer-to-peer trading technology that facilitates trading in a distribution-intensive marketplace and improves upon existing business-to-business exchanges. This technology, tradingNetwork™, enables independent businesses to collaborate with one another to improve service to their customers, strengthen relationships between partners, minimize excess inventory, and increase sales opportunities. Each trading partner buys and sells autonomously and automatically, using a private set of rules, with full access to all of its enterprise data. We have created a generic, extensible, and object-oriented infrastructure that may be customized by each partner to intelligently manage and control decision-making. Objects in the infrastructure include decisions (e.g., Buy-Side Partner Selection), criteria (e.g., price, preferred partners, promise dates), and criteria parameters (e.g., preferred price point, importance of individual criterion). Messages and data are passed between partners and between the intelligent trading component of a partner and that partner's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system using a customized protocol of XML documents.