Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks—An Intelligent Negotiation-Based Framework

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the study, the researchers proposed an Intelligent Negotiated-Based Framework for Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks. Although the study stands out as an interesting study, the following issues need to be eliminated.

1) Line 275 does not show the reference. This error needs to be fixed.

2) The developed approach is said to be decentralized, but how to control this decentralized approach?

3) The figures look very disproportionate. It would be appropriate to correct the color selection of some shapes. It would be more beneficial to choose more matte colors for readability. 

4) The concepts of "Quality Certification", "Collaboration Degree" and "Location" given in Table 2 should be detailed. What do the 1 and 0 values in the Quality Certification column mean? Does the term location matter? What effect do the values in the Collaboration Degree column have? These should be described in detail under Table 2. Even if a “Plan Score” is obtained through the formulas given in Table 2, explaining these concepts will increase the readability of the article.

5) What does the “Plan Score” in Table 4 mean? Table 4 and even all tables need to be interpreted.

6) What do the values obtained in Table 5 mean? What does it show with the difference obtained as a result of iterations? What's going on with this iteration? There is no explanation for these.

7) Iteration results of different methods are given in Table 5 and Table 6. What could be the reasons for these differences? This has not been discussed, it will be valuable to discuss this part in terms of revealing the differences of the methods.

8) No limitations of the proposed method are mentioned. What problems the proposed method might have should be discussed.

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for the valuable suggestions provided. Those suggestions were of great benefit for improving the quality level of the manuscript.

Kindly find the modified version of the manuscript, with respective added/changed sentences written in yellow and green colour.

 

Reviewer 1

In the study, the researchers proposed an Intelligent Negotiated-Based Framework for Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks. Although the study stands out as an interesting study, the following issues need to be eliminated.

1) Line 275 does not show the reference. This error needs to be fixed.

Reply: We corrected in the new version of the document

2) The developed approach is said to be decentralized, but how to control this decentralized approach?

Reply: We rewrite two paragraphs from line 357 to 369 with the following text:

With the present approach, every business opportunity proposed by a customer can be tackled through a business front-office that acts as a broker, interfacing with the collaborative network. The broker acts as a cloud service, providing the necessary tools access to assist the creation of the supply chain aimed to address the business opportunity. The event that triggers the start of the negotiation process is the submission by a partner of the technical specification form that details the characteristics of the new product and its manufacturing process on the negotiation platform. From this moment forward, the broker (web service) takes over the support of the entire negotiation process, ensuring compliance with the rules initially established in the business proposal definition. With this approach, the decision-making process is ensured on a decentralized non-hierarchical basis.

The broker starts by accessing the partner search module, which allows him to identify the list of potential partners that satisfy the business and technological requirements to participate in the collaborative network.  

3) The figures look very disproportionate. It would be appropriate to correct the color selection of some shapes. It would be more beneficial to choose more matte colors for readability. 

Reply: We applied changes to address your suggestions, namely Figure 3; Figure 4; Figure 5. In addition, most of the tables were reformatted according to your suggestions.

4) The concepts of "Quality Certification", "Collaboration Degree" and "Location" given in Table 2 should be detailed. What do the 1 and 0 values in the Quality Certification column mean? Does the term location matter? What effect do the values in the Collaboration Degree column have? These should be described in detail under Table 2. Even if a “Plan Score” is obtained through the formulas given in Table 2, explaining these concepts will increase the readability of the article.

Reply: According to your suggestions, we rewrite two paragraphs from line 670 to 702. The new text is the following:

In order to test and validate the Intelligent Collaborative Planning Framework proposal an application case based on the footwear sector industry was constructed. This application case scenario considered a three-stage production process. For each one of the production stages, the Partner Search module identified 4 potential partners with the relevant KPIs presented in the Table 2. The list of KPIs presented in the Table 2 is indicative and defined according to the characteristics of the business opportunity, the potential customer requirements and agreement of the partners invited to enter the negotiation process. In reality, the negotiation platform has more than 100 assessment KPIs that cover aspects such as collaboration degree, technical expertise, product quality, delivery, cost, flexibility, environmental practices, and others.

Initially, the broker and the selected partners collaboratively define the criteria that will support subsequent decisions in the process, namely the multi-criteria assessment of the plan proposals.

In the present application case, the collaboration degree presents the partner historical assessment from other partners that were involved in previous projects. The quality certification is a binary assessment (1 - Yes; 0 – No) that establishes if the partner has a quality certification desirable for that particular product. The third criterion chosen for the application case was cost. In this case, the cost is a function of the partner's capacity model (refer to section 4.2) and the corresponding time period for the quotation request in the negotiation process. Table 3 presents the selected criteria and the corresponding weight.

Based on the weight values assigned to each evaluation criterion, the minimization process is carried out based on the objective function defined in equation 9, while ensuring the delivery deadline as a hard constraint. For each evaluation criteria, the normalized objective function is determined according to equation 8.

 

 

5) What does the “Plan Score” in Table 4 mean? Table 4 and even all tables need to be interpreted.

Reply: It was detailed the meaning  of the plan score in Table 4 and its interpretation. We rewrote the paragraph from line 716 to 729 as following:

Table 4 presents an evaluation of five alternative plans, considering the agreed criteria items, which consider the Cost, Collaboration degree, Quality certification. The data presented in the Table 4 is based on a test case with the participation of partners from the project. In the presented application case, the scores for the alternative plan 1 involving partners 1; 5; 10 were Cost = 2400 (with best minimum = 2360); Collaboration = 250 (with best minimum = 245); and Quality = 2 ((with best maximum = 3). After the normalization it is obtained the following values, Cost = 0,9833 (2360/2400), Collaboration = 0,8621 (250/290) and Quality = 0.6667 (2/3), and finally the plan score is obtained through the weighted average of these three normalized KPIs.

 

6) What do the values obtained in Table 5 mean? What does it show with the difference obtained as a result of iterations? What's going on with this iteration? There is no explanation for these.

Reply:  It was explained the meaning score in Table 5 and its interpretation. We inserted three new paragraphs to help explain table 5 from line 794 to 806 as following:

Since the negotiation process of building, the overall plan of the supply chain relies on the minimization of the number of requests for quotation (RfQ) for every potential partner, the approach of defining new framings is a critical step.

Using the four implemented strategies for the intelligent planning module (see Table 1) it was possible to assess the rate of improvement of the multi-criteria evaluation of the optimized alternative collaborative plans on each iteration.

Table 5 presents the intelligent planning module results comparison for each strategy on each iteration using a uniform normalization procedure. The initial values for the temporal frames used in the RfQ were the same for all four approaches, which lead to an initial set of results similar for all four strategies after the plan optimization. For the second iteration and following, a new temporal frame was defined for every RfQ according to the applied strategy. Table 5 presents the normalized plan assessment score in each strategy approach through the five iterations.

7) Iteration results of different methods are given in Table 5 and Table 6. What could be the reasons for these differences? This has not been discussed, it will be valuable to discuss this part in terms of revealing the differences of the methods.

Reply: We rewrote the text in order to discuss the methods and inserted a new paragraph to explain the results from line 826 to 833 as following:

A preliminary analysis, using Delphi approach, based on a results discussion with the participants in the project points to two explanations: First, since the supply chain studied has seasonal demand peaks and the load is shared among the competitors, the strategy approaches that seek to dynamically move away faster from the overload periods, present better results (i.e. Best Proposal). Second, not every partner is really committed in competing for a business opportunity. This means that the strategic approaches that favor the best competitors tend to obtain best results faster (i.e., Best Proposal and Genetic Approach)

8) No limitations of the proposed method are mentioned. What problems the proposed method might have should be discussed.

Reply: We insert of a new paragraph to explain the limitations for the proposed method: The new paragraph is in line 863 to 876 as following:

The novelty of the present framework solution derives from the implementation of an innovative non-hierarchical decentralized collaborative planning tool. This tool links a multi-criteria optimization mathematical algorithm with an intelligent planning module, which feeds the optimal solution search engine with a feedback loop enabling the system to learn from previous responses, minimizing the number of negotiation iterations.

 

The framework results have been very promising for the tested application cases and the industry partners that collaborate in the project recognized the merits of this approach. The system is currently available and accessible as a cloud service. Current version was subject to minor improvements over the years.

Regarding the limitations of the proposed tool, the authors believe that because the study focused on networks of SMEs in the footwear sector, there is a need to validate the proposals of this work in other sectors. It is also important to acknowledge, that for the system function properly it relays in the trust between the partners participating in the collaborative network. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I have read the article entitled “Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks – An Intelligent Negotiated Based Framework” and suggested some suggestions for improving this article.

a)       The main contribution and originality should be explained in more detail; which part of the proposal is new?

b)       The approach's motivation needs further clarification; why was this research work undertaken?

c)       The authors need to reduce the similarity of this article

d)       Discussion of related work in fuzzy decision making should be expanded with more recent work.

e)       Minor grammar and syntax issues need correction to enhance readability. Check for grammer issues and abbreviations.

f)        Captions of the figures must be elloberative.

g)       How practitioners can use the proposed method in the real-life problems, how the proposed method is useful for future studies.

h)       The conclusion section is not useful; authors need to conclude their work in-depth, and the paper should provide the limitations and recommendations for future studies.

i) The research gap is unclear. It is essential to describe the research gap.

i)         Refine the literature review by adding some latest research work and removing irrelevant references before 2017:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-018-3521-2

 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-021-05829-8

The paper needs a few English improvements.

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for the valuable suggestions provided. Those suggestions were of great benefit for improving the quality level of the manuscript.

Kindly find the modified version of the manuscript, with respective added/changed sentences written in yellow and green colour.

Reviewer 2

I have read the article entitled “Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks – An Intelligent Negotiated Based Framework” and suggested some suggestions for improving this article.

1. a)       The main contribution and originality should be explained in more detail; which part of the proposal is new?

And 

1. b)  The approach's motivation needs further clarification; why was this research work undertaken?

 

Reply to a) and b): To provide further clarity on the main contribution and motivation, a new paragraph has been inserted to explain the results from line 74 to 84.

The present framework solution stands out for its innovative implementation of a non-hierarchical decentralized collaborative planning tool. In contrast to previous projects and research groups in the field, the current approach distinguishes itself by moving away from centralized planning decisions and embracing non-hierarchical negotiation. In reality, EU-funded projects like OPIM (One Product Integrated Manufacturing), PRODNET II (Production Planning and Management in an Extended Enterprise), Globeman21 (Global Manufacturing in the 21st Century), ECOLEAD (European Collaborative Networked Organizations Leadership Initiative), BIVEE (Business Innovation and Virtual Enterprise Environment), and Glonet (Global Enterprise Network focusing on Customer-centric Collaboration) do not incorporate such human assisted non-hierarchical negotiation in their planning processes.

 

 

1. c)       The authors need to reduce the similarity of this article

 

Reply: The paper undergo substantial revisions, with the most significant changes being highlighted in yellow within the text

 

1. d)       Discussion of related work in fuzzy decision making should be expanded with more recent work.

Reply: The authors included a reference to fuzzy logic decision making as a viable approach to future developments in further research

 

1. e)       Minor grammar and syntax issues need correction to enhance readability. Check for grammer issues and abbreviations.

Reply: The text was recheck by a native English speaker.

 

 

1. f)        Captions of the figures must be elloberative.

Reply: Captions of the figures have been improved.

 

 

1. g)       How practitioners can use the proposed method in the real-life problems, how the proposed method is useful for future studies.

And

1. h)       The conclusion section is not useful; authors need to conclude their work in-depth, and the paper should provide the limitations and recommendations for future studies.

 

 

Reply to g) and h): The authors included in the conclusion section the following paragraphs to clarify the practical use of the proposed method, limitations and recommendations for future studies  from line 860 to 885

 

The novelty of the present framework solution derives from the implementation of an innovative non-hierarchical decentralized collaborative planning tool. This tool links a multi-criteria optimization mathematical algorithm with an intelligent planning module, which feeds the optimal solution search engine with a feedback loop enabling the system to learn from previous responses, minimizing the number of negotiation iterations.

The framework results have been very promising for the tested application cases and the industry partners that collaborate in the project recognized the merits of this approach. The system is currently available and accessible as a cloud service. Current version was subject to minor improvements over the years.

Regarding the limitations of the proposed tool, the authors believe that because the study focused on networks of SMEs in the footwear sector, there is a need to validate the proposals of this work in other sectors. It is also important to acknowledge, that for the system function properly it relays in the trust between the partners participating in the collaborative network.

As further developments, the research project team intends to additionally evaluate the current software prototype of the Intelligent Collaborative Planning Framework with more application cases based on other industrial sectors. Another research path includes the research and development of other intelligent planning strategies aimed to make the framework more flexible and effective.

Furthermore, it is the intention of the authors to explore new technological approaches to the non-hierarchical collaborative plan building phase. Among the promising approaches are the use of spherical fuzzy Dombi aggregation operators in decision support system due to the fuzziness and unpredictability of the negotiation environment (Khan, Mahmood, & Ullah, 2021), and the combination of supervised machine learning techniques combined with discrete event simulation to address the delivery reliability improvement in the supply chain (Cavalcante, Frazzon, Forcellini, & Ivanov, 2019).

 

 

 

1. i) The research gap is unclear. It is essential to describe the research gap.

Reply: This question was answered in topics a) and b)

 

 

1. i)         Refine the literature review by adding some latest research work and removing irrelevant references before 2017:

Reply: The authors performed a literature revision that is now present in the current version of the document. The reference Applications of improved spherical fuzzy Dombi aggregation operators in decision support system has been included.

The new document version includes from lines 882 – 888 the following text:

 

 

Furthermore, it is the intention of the authors to explore new technological approaches to the non-hierarchical collaborative plan building phase. Among the promising approaches are the use of spherical fuzzy Dombi aggregation operators in decision sup-port system due to the fuzziness and unpredictability of the negotiation environment (Khan, Mahmood, & Ullah, 2021), and the combination of supervised machine learning techniques combined with discrete event simulation to address the delivery reliability improvement in the supply chain (Cavalcante, Frazzon, Forcellini, & Ivanov, 2019).

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper describes a non-hierarchical decentralized collaborative planning framework focused on supply chain optimization for SMEs. This is a Multi-objective optimization problem with limited information. The paper represents (part of) the results of CoReNet project from the EU’s FP7 programme.

It seems that the paper was sent in haste. There are a lot of typographical errors and some lexical ones, missing resource references, and others.
Almost all references are more than ten years old. On the other hand, many assertions (“Research shows…”) are without them. The results are also from the pre-Covid era and different economic and business situations.

The equations are usually numbered.

Chapter 3.2 describes in detail the min-max feature normalization. However, linear and vector normalization is used in the use-case example, rendering this description obsolete. Also, to consolidate the minimum and maximum criteria, negation is used. In the use case, the function inversion is applied.

The use case is not straightforward. It should have a more elaborate introduction to describe what the authors want to convey to the reader.

One of the proposed optimization criteria is minimizing the costs. However, increased costs can sometimes produce greater revenue (added value). The example observes single-work employment. In reality, the SMEs can work on different contracts simultaneously. It is unclear if the proposed framework can deal with this scenario properly.

Table 3 is confusing because not all the weights are given. It seems that not all of the parameters are used and are not described in the text. There is no rationalization for why specific weight values are used.

There are some lexical mistakes. E.g. "...with de networked...".

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for the valuable suggestions provided. Those suggestions were of great benefit for improving the quality level of the manuscript.

Kindly find the modified version of the manuscript, with respective added/changed sentences written in yellow and green colour.

Reviewer 3

 

The paper describes a non-hierarchical decentralized collaborative planning framework focused on supply chain optimization for SMEs. This is a Multi-objective optimization problem with limited information. The paper represents (part of) the results of CoReNet project from the EU’s FP7 programme.

It seems that the paper was sent in haste. There are a lot of typographical errors and some lexical ones, missing resource references, and others.

Reply: The text was rechecked by a native English speaker.

Almost all references are more than ten years old. On the other hand, many assertions (“Research shows…”) are without them. The results are also from the pre-Covid era and different economic and business situations.

Reply: The authors performed a literature revision that is now present in the current version of the document.

 

The equations are usually numbered.

Reply: The authors applied numbers to equations

Chapter 3.2 describes in detail the min-max feature normalization. However, linear and vector normalization is used in the use-case example, rendering this description obsolete. Also, to consolidate the minimum and maximum criteria, negation is used. In the use case, the function inversion is applied.

The use case is not straightforward. It should have a more elaborate introduction to describe what the authors want to convey to the reader.

One of the proposed optimization criteria is minimizing the costs. However, increased costs can sometimes produce greater revenue (added value). The example observes single-work employment.

 In reality, the SMEs can work on different contracts simultaneously. It is unclear if the proposed framework can deal with this scenario properly.

Table 3 is confusing because not all the weights are given. It seems that not all of the parameters are used and are not described in the text. There is no rationalization for why specific weight values are used.

Reply: The authors rewrite the application case description in order to tackle the suggestion made by the reviewer, Changes to the document include the following text lines 670 – 702;  716-730; 794 – 806; 826 – 833; and 863 – 888.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have made the requested revisions and the article has been sufficiently updated. It is acceptable in its current form.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable contributions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well revised and recommended for publication.

It is fine

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable contributions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The content of the paper has been improved. However, I still think that some aspects of the research are unrealistic. Was the proposed methodology tested in several real-life scenarios?

There are still several typographical errors, some squashed images, etc. Maybe this is due to the editing process of the publisher.

There are two references written in Chinese logograms. I am not sure if they are among the references at the end.

No comment.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable contributions.

Attached is a file with the answers to your concerns.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf