Business-to-Business E-Marketplaces: A Literature Overview and Motivations

E-business applications require solid business models to support the manufacturing enterprises involved and gain real benefits from these applications. E-marketplaces profitability can be increased by an integration of multi-agent paradigm, production planning, negotiation and coalition support tools. This chapter introduces the concept of e-marketplaces and the adoption in Business-to-Business environment. Then, the state of the scientific literature is discussed for the several tools proposed in the literature. The chapter discusses the needs of innovative tools to support the e-marketplaces in order to increase the added value by the e-marketplaces. Finally, the motivations are discussed and the organization of the book is described.