# Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks--An Intelligent Negotiation-Based Framework
## 3 Framework Proposal
### Collaborative Planning Service  
The collaborative planning service is a web-based tool implemented on the Liferay portlet container platform. It functions as a versatile portlet, providing distinct web-based views tailored for specific user groups/roles. These views facilitate user interaction through the collaborative planning tool, as illustrated in Figure 6.  
The diagram illustrates the technical decisions made for the integration of the tools developed to facilitate the network design and setup for collaborative planning.  
To provide end users with seamless access, the application was made available through a centralized access point, leveraging the capabilities of the Liferay portal. This portal enhances the services by incorporating social networking functionalities and advanced communication services, enabling activities such as commenting, ranking, reporting bugs, and seeking assistance.  
The proposed approach offers numerous benefits to manufacturers and suppliers in the textile and footwear sectors seeking agile solutions for order management and collaborative production planning processes, particularly for the production of small series of innovative and fashionable products.  
In fact, the solution provides the following advantages:  
* The solution is readily accessible and user-friendly, as the tools offer an advanced graphical user interface (GUI) and are conveniently accessible within a unified portal, eliminating the need for complex installations.
* It facilitates the exchange and automatic verification of business information through familiar channels such as email, effectively concealing the technical intricacies associated with the internal format of exchanged documents.
* It aids in partner selection by leveraging the manufacturer's existing information and fosters an open collaborative environment for jointly planning and agreeing upon production plans with the selected partners.  
The collaborative planning framework empowers each partner to directly propose new delivery dates, lead times, and costs through a shared web-based planning graphical tool accessible to all supply network partners. Whenever a partner suggests a change to  
Figure 6: CoReNet framework architecture diagram.  
a specific operation, it effectively requests the affected partner to accept the change and declare its associated cost or present a counterproposal.  
Each negotiation round corresponds to a predefined time period dedicated to discussing and negotiating delivery times and costs, enabling partners to submit quotations for each request for quotation (RQ) initiated by other partners.  
Each proposed change \"triggers\" RfQs among all involved partners, prompting them to submit quotations that fully or partially address the requested RfQ or even propose further modifications. Once a proposal attains 100% agreement among all partners (i.e., no pending notifications), it is considered a plan. However, any supply network partner can still modify the plan within the negotiation time period.  
In each negotiation iteration, the intelligent planning module suggests a revised stage framing, generating optimized responses through the multicriteria optimization module. This enhances the solutions offered throughout the collaborative planning process.  
These collaborative plans are serialized on the basis of a predetermined set of criteria established by the broker and partners. For each criterion, the degree of importance can be defined using a percentage score as the final weighting factor, which determines the best partner proposal. This approach ensures that each criterion carries a distinct level of importance, expressed through a ranking system.