Distributed decision making support for supply chain management using multiagent technology

Abstract

Today's businesses are facing increasingly greater environmental pressures including global competitive markets, demanding customers, and accelerating technology development. In order to survive and prosper, businesses will have to manage their supply chain more effectively. The strategic solution is organizing the supply chain as an integrated and customer-centered "virtual corporation" to optimize the supply chain. In this "virtual corporation", all the organizations would like to work together, display the total cooperation, not only sharing resources, time, and energy, but also the benefits they have achieved, and develop the total error free and most effective network. Supply chain planning is the core problem in supply chain decision making. With the increase in the length and size of today's supply chain, the complexity of supply chain planning explodes. Therefore,, conventional planning systems are no more advisable, because of such weaknesses as centralized top-down control, complexity, and uncertainty and such limitations as communication bandwidth and speed. This report suggests a different perspective, one that is distributed planning method, focused on the local autonomous agents who make their local plan based on total customer service.