This paper aims to deal with the problem of multi‐plant purchase coordination in an assemble‐to‐order (ATO) environment, when volume discount schedules are provided by each of the suppliers.
This paper uses linear programming and a multi‐agent system to coordinate multi‐plant purchasing activities in order to minimize the total purchasing cost.
An integrated linear programming model and multi‐agent approach is perfectly suited to the purchase coordination in multi‐plant organizations in order to achieve the global profit.
The proposed model provides an effective and efficient coordination mechanism that helps multi‐plant organization and suppliers to maintain the availability of materials in the right quantity, with the right quality and at minimum possible cost.
