# Collaborative Planning in Non-Hierarchical Networks--An Intelligent Negotiation-Based Framework
## 2 Collaborative Planning--Technical Background
### Collaborative Networks  
In today's fiercely competitive environment, markets are undergoing rapid transformations, fueled by customer-driven demands. Customers are seeking greater variety, uncompromising quality, exceptional service, and prompt, dependable delivery. Combined with this reality, technological developments are happening at an incredible speed, resulting in innovative products and radical transformation of manufacturing processes. These changes are shifting the way businesses and manufacturing operations are conducted in networked organizations [10; 11].  
In the beginning of the 2020s, companies realized the need to look beyond the borders of their own firm to their suppliers and their customers to improve market value through smarter approaches. This movement changed the company's focus from internal management of business and manufacturing processes to managing across the supply network [12].  
[PERSON] [13] commented that one of the most profound changes in recent years was the recognition even from the largest business organizations, such as corporations, that they have only relatively few competencies in which they can be said to have a real differentiation. This recognition has resulted in a focus upon core business and a trend to seek the other competencies from other partners. The growth of partnerships has placed increasing emphasis on managing relations between partners in the organizational network.  
[PERSON], [PERSON] et al. [14] summarized this new paradigm by pointing out that recent trends such as outsourcing and mass customization are forcing companies to find flexible ways to meet customer demand. This flexibility is forcing companies to migrate from traditional forms of functional commitment with focal companies in a network to scenarios where the focus is on the optimization of core activities for each partner to maximize the speed of response to changes in customer expectations.  
In accordance, customer-driven supply chains are characterized by the speed at which the system can adjust its output within the available range of the external flexibility types: product, mix, volume, and delivery, in response to an external stimulus such as a customer order or a business opportunity.  
Research on collaborative networks of innovative and fashionable products has identified six key phases that organizations must address to seize a specific market opportunity until the final dispatch to the customer (refer to Figure 1). Furthermore, it has revealed that each of these phases presents significant challenges in terms of time constraints, resource consumption, and complexity [15].  
In face of these critical impact phases, the prevailing market environment asks for flexible and reactive organizational structures which rapidly adjust to new manufacturing challenges and revise the business requirements accordingly. These new market characteristics are compelling manufacturing networks to embody shorter lifetime existences and take advantage of new infrastructure technologies to support distributed decision making, information sharing, and knowledge management [16].