Supporting Cooperative Demand Fulfillment in Supply Networks Using Autonomous Control and Multi-Agent-Systems

Today, economic value creation is typically carried out in supply networks, which are temporal coalitions of independent partners. Each partner has its own decision competencies but the common objective of value creation requires a coordinated planning of the value creating processes. We show that the common decision making process can be understood as a combination of a Multi Agent System (MAS) and decision making according to the paradigm of autonomous control. This combination is an appropriate approach to coordinate the agents in the demand fulfilment process. We extract the advantages and deficiencies of autonomously controlled MAS. Our example of transport process planning combines the advantages of autonomous decision making by the agents and of a central coordination instance. This coordination instance may intervene only if the achievement of the common objective is severely endangered.