A Multi-agent Approach for Composing Negotiation Items in a Reverse Logistic Virtual Market

In this work a reverse production process is conceived as a service-based manufacturing network (ecosystem), in which the manufacturing companies “play” in the ecosystem by means of market services. One complex problem in a reverse logistic virtual market is the efficient composition and decomposition of the negotiation items. A negotiation item is defined as an item subject to be recycled: used products/scraps/wastes, a sub-part of a used product/scrap/waste, or the materials that are contained in the used product/scrap/waste. In this work we present a Multi-agent approach in order to compose the last two types of negotiation items from an orchestration of negotiation processes among the different stakeholders of the reverse logistic process (i.e. collecting points, recycling plants, disassembly plants, secondary material markets). In this way a call for buying, for example 10 tons of steel, can be handle in the virtual market as a complex process of buying and selling used products/scraps/wastes, or their sub-parts, in order to decompose and pre-process them (by recycling and/or disassembly plants) for extracting the steel contained in those items.