Abstract. This paper presents a novel approach for managing multibilateral concurrent negotiations. We extend our previous work by considering a situation where a buyer agent negotiates with multiple seller agents concurrently over multiple continuous issues instead of a single issue. A related work in this area considers a meta-strategy for bilateral negotiations. This work adapts the previous related work to coordinate multi-bilateral concurrent negotiations taking into consideration the different behaviors of the opponents during negotiation to decide on choosing the appropriate negotiation strategy (i.e., trade-off or concession) for the buyer agent's delegates at each negotiation round. A negotiation meta-strategy to coordinate the one-to-many negotiation form is proposed and empirically tested under various negotiation environments. The experiments show the robustness of our coordination mechanism.

This study investigates the status of e-SCM and performance among Jordanian manufacturing sector. The objective of this study is to analyze the impact of trust and communication on the e-SCM usage. Moreover, the study investigates the effect of the trust and communication on the firm's performance while the e-SCM usage is used as a mediating factor on firm's performance. The proposed research model was validated by distributing 250 survey questionnaires to the manufacturing sector in Jordan. Structural equation modelling (SEM) technique was used to analyze the results. One of the main limitations of this study was that the results could not be universal since the study was limited to Jordan. We discussed the implications of our results for research and practice.

Forest fires are a serious ecological concern, and smoke is an early warning indicator. Early smoke images barely capture a tiny portion of the total smoke. Because of the irregular nature of smoke’s dispersion and the dynamic nature of the surrounding environment, smoke identification is complicated by minor pixel-based traits. This study presents a new framework that decreases the sensitivity of various YOLO detection models. Additionally, we compare the detection performance and speed of different YOLO models such as YOLOv3, YOLOv5, and YOLOv7 with prior ones such as Fast R-CNN and Faster R-CNN. Moreover, we follow the use of a collected dataset that describes three distinct detection areas, namely close, medium, and far distance, to identify the detection model’s ability to recognize smoke targets correctly. Our model outperforms the gold-standard detection method on a multi-oriented dataset for detecting forest smoke by an mAP accuracy of 96.8% at an IoU of 0.5 using YOLOv5x. Additionally, the findings of the study show an extensive improvement in detection accuracy using several data-augmentation techniques. Moreover, YOLOv7 outperforms YOLOv3 with an mAP accuracy of 95%, compared to 94.8% using an SGD optimizer. Extensive research shows that the suggested method achieves significantly better results than the most advanced object-detection algorithms when used on smoke datasets from wildfires, while maintaining a satisfactory performance level in challenging environmental conditions.

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This paper addrcsse.t; the problem of flexible procurement of multiple services with multiple non-functional characteristics, i.e., quality of service attributes. We consider the one-to-many negotiation approach as a flexible method for procuring multiple services by a buyer agent. We address the problem of coordinating multiple concurrent negotiations and propose a novel dynamic negotiation strategy that considers the behaviors of the opponents of the current negotiation encounter in managing the local reservation values of the common negotiation issues (attributes) of different services. Most previous works consider the problem of negotiation over a single issue. We investigate a more complex situation where a buyer agent negotiates over multiple services given that each service has multiple negotiation issues. The experimental results show an evidence for the effectiveness and robustness of our dynamic negotiation strategy in various negotiation environments.