Guest Editors' introduction to special section: Supply chain trading agent research

Predictability of prices and availability are becoming less predictable in emerging supply chain environments, as product lifecycles shorten and organizations pursue increased agility. This leads to new competitive and strategic interactions among actors across the supply chain. It also threatens to overwhelm human decision capabilities with a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. Recent advances in technical infrastructure have enabled new types of interorganizational interactions, but have not addressed the need for fundamentally new kinds of decision support systems that can help tame the complexity of this emerging environment. The papers in this special issue describe progress in semi-autonomous trading agents that are being developed to meet this need. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.