A Multi-Agent Approach Towards Collaborative Supply Chain Management

Supply chain collaboration has become a critical success factor for supply chain management and effectively improves the performance of organizations in various industries. Supply chain collaboration builds on information sharing, collaborative planning and execution. Information technology is an important enabler of collaborative supply chain management. Many information systems have been developed for supply chain management from legacy systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) into the newly developed advanced planning and scheduling system (APS) and e-commerce solutions. However, these systems do not provide sufficient support to achieve collaborative supply chain. Recently, intelligent agent technology and multi-agent system (MAS) have received a great potential in supporting transparency in information flows of business networks and modeling of the dynamic supply chain for collaborative supply chain planning and execution. This paper explores the similarities between multi-agent system and supply chain system to justify the use of multi-agent technology as an appropriate approach to support supply chain collaboration. In addition, the framework of the multi-agent-based collaborative supply chain management system will be presented

Integrated optimization and multi-agent technology for combined production and transportation planning

In this research project, an integration of multi-agent technology and optimization techniques is suggested for the combined production and transport planning problem in a transport chain. The chain consists of a producer, a transport operator, and a number of customers. Optimization decomposition techniques use (dual) prices of resources to coordinate the generation of different plans in the so called sub-problems. We argue that these dual prices and generated plans can enhance the multi-agent based approach. By using the agent technology, we can better resemble the interactions between real planners reallocating resources. A transport chain within the food industry has been selected for validating the developed solution method