Exploiting Data Mining Techniques for Improving the Efficiency of a Supply Chain Management Agent

Supply chain management (SCM) environments are often dynamic markets providing a plethora of information, either complete or incomplete. It is, therefore, evident that such environments demand intelligent solutions, which can perceive variations and act in order to achieve maximum revenue. To do so, they must also provide some sophisticated mechanism for exploiting the full potential of the environments they inhabit. Advancing on the way autonomous solutions usually deal with the SCM process, we have built a robust and highly-adaptable mechanism for efficiently dealing with all SCM facets, while at the same time incorporating a module that exploits data mining technology in order to forecast the price of the winning bid in a given order and, thus, adjust its bidding strategy. The paper presents our agent, Mertacor, and focuses on the forecasting mechanism it incorporates, aiming to optimal agent efficiency