Coordination of supply webs based on dispositive protocols (original) (raw)

Scheduling the Supply Chain by Teams of Agents

2003

When a supply chain is established supply chain management (SCM) needs supporting tools for the tasks of operative planning, scheduling, and coordination. These tasks have to be performed not only on the level of the enterprises involved but also within their established business entities (e.g. plants, areas, resource groups, resources) in which the high level schedules have to be put into operation. Most approaches of SCM favor a hierarchical coordination of the supply chain together with powerful algorithmic solutions for the mainly predictive scheduling tasks. These approaches are lacking the incorporation of feedback from lower levels and possibilities of reactive scheduling. Thus flexibility and reactivity are main issues to be improved.

Agent-based modeling of supply chains for distributed scheduling

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2006

This paper considers a supply chain that comprises multiple independent and autonomous enterprises (project managers) that seek and select various contractors to complete operations of their project. Both the project managers and contractors jointly determine the schedules of their operations while no single enterprise has complete information of other enterprises. The centralized scheduling approach that can usually obtain good global performance but must share nearly complete information that is difficult or even impractical due to the distributed nature of real-life supply chains. This paper proposes an agent-based supply chain model to support distributed scheduling. A modified contract-net protocol (MCNP) is proposed to enable more information sharing among the enterprises than conventional CNP. Experimental simulation studies are conducted to compare and contrast the performances of the centralized [centralized heuristic (CTR)], conventional CNP, and MNCP approaches. The results show that MCNP outperforms CNP and performs comparably with CTR when project complexity is high in terms of the total supply chain operating cost. Moreover, it is found that although CTR is better than MCNP in terms of global performance, MCNP yields good schedule stability when facing unexpected disturbances.

COORDINATING AGENTS - An Analysis of Coordination in Supply-chain Management Tasks

Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, 2010

A multi-agent planning problem consists of a set of activities that need to be planned by several agents. Here, plan coordination methods play an important role, since the independently generated plans by different agents can lead to an infeasible joint solution. We study one particular plan coordination approach, called coordination-by-design, which allows each agent to make its own plan completely independent of the others, while guaranteeing the feasibility of the combined plan of all the agents as a joint solution to the multi-agent planning problem. In this paper, we are interested in a class of multi-agent planning problems that arise in supply-chain management applications. Although the coordination problem in general is Σ p 2-complete, it turns out for this special class, the complexity of coordination checking is polynomial and deciding a minimum coordination set is NP-complete. We develop a polynomial-time approximation algorithm to compute a sufficient coordination set.

COORDINATING AGENTS: An analysis of coordination in supply-chain management like tasks}

A multi-agent supply network control framework

Control Engineering Practice, 2007

This paper presents a bottom-up solution for the supply network coordination problem. This manuscript treats the coordination as an ongoing task and takes disturbances and exceptions as business as usual. A manufacturing control and coordination mechanism based on PROSA and ants . Self-organising in multi-agent coordination and control using stigmergy. ESOA] is used as base for the overall coordination of the supply network. Reputation serves to enforce the social behaviour among the production entities. The interactions of the control mechanism with the reputation models are given. r

An Agent-Based Cooperative Mechanism for Integrated Production and Transportation Planning

2008

This paper presents a decentralized cooperative economic scheduling mechanism for a supply chain environment. For this purpose, we design autonomous agents that minimize the production or transportation and outsourcing costs incurred by the external execution of a task. The decentralized cooperative scheduling approach comprises two parts: the individual optimization of an agent's local schedule and the cooperative contract optimization, either by outsourcing the task or by (re-)contracting the release time and due time with the contract partners aiming to maximize their total profits. A negotiation mechanism based on trust accounts is employed to protect the agents against systematic exploitation by their partners.

Cooperative planning in dynamic supply chains

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2005

This paper describes an order planning system for dynamic supply-chains, addressing the requirements of a make-to-order business environment. A distributed and decentralised information system, based on an architecture of agents and extensively using the internet, was designed and implemented to provide new and more powerful decision support. The system aims at responding to the basic requirements of cooperativeness, integration and configurability. It was developed under the scope of the COOPERATE European Project, and implements the functionality defined in the context of the 'request feasibility studies for the network' business solution.

Multi Agent Supply Chain Architecture to Optimize Distributed Decision Making

Proceedings of the 7th …, 2003

functionalities in a closed environment with a fixed number of actors or components [3]. The supply chain activities and entities are not fixed, and the coordination between them is a hierarchical scheduling problem. In the real business environment there are no obligations for companies to remain with a supply chain for a certain period. Companies may join or leave the chain according to their own judgment. However, this representation is not accuracy for such problem and do not reflect the real situation. Functional agents have to live and cooperate in a dynamic way [4].

An Agent-based framework for cooperation in Supply

2014

Supply Chain coordination has become a critical success factor for Supply Chain management (SCM) and effectively improving the performance of organizations in various industries. Companies are increasingly located at the intersection of one or more corporate networks which are designated by “Supply Chain”. Managing this chain is mainly based on an 'information sharing ' and redeployment activities between the various links that comprise it. Several attempts have been made by industrialists and researchers to educate policymakers about the gains to be made by the implementation of cooperative relationships. The approach presented in this paper here is among the works that aim to propose solutions related to information systems distributed Supply Chains to enable the different actors of the chain to improve their performance. We propose in particular solutions that focus on cooperation between actors in the Supply Chain.

Coordination of supply webs based on dispositive protocols (original) (raw)

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