Multi-behavior agent model for supply chain management (original) (raw)

Multi-behavior agent model for planning in supply chains: An application to the lumber industry

2008

Recent economic and international threats to western industries have encouraged companies to increase their performance in any manner possible. Many look to deal quickly with disturbances, reduce inventory and exchange information promptly throughout the supply chain. In other words they want to become more agile. To reach this objective it is critical for planning systems to present planning strategies adapted to the different contexts, to attain better performances. The development of integrated supply chains and the use of inter-organizational information systems have increased business interdependencies and in turn the need for increased collaboration to deal with disturbance in a synchronized way. Thus, agility and synchronization in supply chains are critical to maintain overall performance. In order to develop tools to increase the agility of the supply chain and to promote the collaborative management of such disturbances, agent-based technology takes advantage of the ability of agents to make autonomous decisions in a distributed network through the use of advanced collaboration mechanisms.

Agent-Based supply chain Planning in the forest products industry

Information Technology …, 2006

Because of new economical challenges and recent trends regarding international trade and globalization, many companies from the Canadian forest products industry have reached the point where profit improvement cannot be reaped without the coordinated involvement of their entire organization. Such a new level of efficiency concerns their distributed facilities and offices spread around the world, as well as their customers. One consequence of this new reality is that forest products companies are now facing the need to reengineer their organizational processes and business practices with their partners. To do this they must adopt new technologies to support the coordination of their planning and control efforts in a customer-centered environment. This paper first proposes a generic software architecture for the development of an experimentation environment to design and test distributed advanced planning and scheduling systems. This architecture allows combining agent-based technology and operations researchbased tools in order to take advantage, on the one hand, of the ability of agent technology to integrate distributed decision problems, and, one the other hand, the ability of operations research to develop and exploit specific normative decision models. Next, this paper describes how this architecture has been configured into an advanced planning and scheduling tool for the lumber industry. Finally, we present how an application of this advanced planning tool is currently being validated and tested in a real manufacturing setting.

Performance Analysis of Multi-Behaviour Agents for Supply Chain Planning

2008

In today's industrial context, competitiveness is closely associated to supply chain performance. Coordination between business units is essential to increase this performance, in order to produce and deliver products on time to customers, at a competitive price. While planning systems usually follows a single straightforward production planning process, this paper proposes that partners adapt together their local planning process (i.e. planning behaviours) to the different situations met in the supply chain environment. Because each partner can choose different behaviour and all behaviours will have an impact on the overall performance, it is difficult to know which is preferable for each partner to increase this performance. Using agent-based technology, simulation experiments have been undertaken to verify if multi-behaviour planning agents who can change planning behaviours to adapt to its environment can increase supply chain performance. These agents have been implemented in an agent-based planning platform, using a case study illustrating a lumber supply chain. The performance analysis shows that advanced planning systems can take advantage of using multiple planning processes, because of the dynamic context of supply chains.

A Multi-Agent System for Supply Chain Management

In today's globalization of manufacturing operations managing the supply chain has become an extremely challenging task as it implies tracking order fulfillment, due dates and billing between partners working at different time-zones, with different currencies, tax systems and way to represent information. To achieve on-line control over the status of an order receipt/delivery in a global manufacturing environment the only possibility is to use latest network technologies for accessing and exchanging electronic information. Latest research in distributed artificial intelligence offers excellent tools for modeling the interactions between different nodes of the supply-chain network. This paper presents a multi-agent system approach to the design of global supply chain management networks. The main advantages of this system in unifying heterogeneous information and offering easy tractability for the manager are illustrated on a particular implementation.

Towards a Multi-Agent System Architecture for Supply Chain Management

ArXiv, 2021

Individual business processes have been changing since the Internet was created, and they are now oriented towards a more distributed and collaborative business model, in an e-commerce environment that adapts itself to the competitive and changing market conditions. This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture for supply chain management, which explores different strategies and offers solutions in a distributed e-commerce environment. The system is designed to support different types of interfaces, which allow interoperating with other business models already developed. In order to show how the entire multi-agent system is being developed, the implementation of a collaborative agent is presented and explained.

A Multi-Agent Decision Support System for Supply Chain Management

2009

This paper presents an extended abstract of the author's doctoral research project on developing a multi-agent intelligent system for automatic managing supply chains. Supply chain management (SCM) is a very complex and dynamic environment. The doctoral work, which started in October 2005, is dedicated to finding better solutions for successful performance in the domain of real-time SCM.

Agent-Oriented Supply-Chain Management

International Journal of Flexible …, 2000

The supply chain is a worldwide network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, and delivered to customers. In recent years, a new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged. It views the supply chain as composed of a set of intelligent software agents, each responsible for one or more activities in the supply chain and each interacting with other agents in the planning and execution of their responsibilities. This paper investigates issues and presents solutions for the construction of such an agent-oriented software architecture. The approach relies on the use of an agent building shell, providing generic, reusable, and guaranteed components and services for communicative-act-based communication, conversational coordination, role-based organization modeling, and others. Using these components, we show two nontrivial agent-based supply-chain architectures able to support complex cooperative work and the management of perturbation caused by stochastic events in the supply chain.

An agent-based architecture for supply chain management

2013 IEEE Eleventh International Symposium on Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ISADS), 2013

Business processes have been changing since the Internet was created, and they are now oriented towards a more distributed and collaborative business model, in an e-commerce environment that adapts itself to the competitive and changing market conditions. This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture for supply chain management, which explores different strategies and offers solutions in a distributed e-commerce environment. The system is designed to support different types of interfaces, which allow interoperating with other business models already developed. In order to show how the entire multi-agent system is being developed, the implementation of a collaborative agent is presented and explained. The testing and evaluation of the entire multi-agent system is being carried out in an agentbased experimentation platform.

Multi-Agent Supply Chain Management: Design Issues for a Generic Architecture

2006

The supply chain is a worldwide network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, and delivered to customers. Supply Chain Management (SCM) is extremely important to the manufacturing and retailing industries. In recent years, a new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged.