Intelligent multi-agents for supply chain management

Supply chain management is an important issue for manufacturing enterprises. The efficiencies of manufacturing enterprises depend on their logistic system. There is no doubt that information technology brings a lot of benefits to the supply chain's operation processes. It shortens lead times and decreases batch sizes, which leads to more efficient and effective order processing. Consequently, technological advances are necessary to keep a competitive advantage. As the availability of Internet technologies is increasing, managers can access online and real-time information. Different methods can be applied to utilize the information but not all the methods are suitable and create benefit to the supply chain management. We investigate the approach of the multi-agents to coordinate the supply chain. The contribution of this paper is summarized as follows: 1. A constraint network model is proposed to model different managers with different operational management skills dynamically. 2. As most of the operation processes are routine jobs, intelligent computer programs (agents) are utilized to replace such processes and reduce the operation cost tremendously. 3. Agents can model the operation processes and communicate through the Internet. This enables different warehouses and manufacturing plants to share the real time information. Therefore, better optimization can be achieved for the coordination of the supply chain. 4. Some possible value-added services such as a bullwhip detection agent and information sharing agent, which can extract useful information for the managers are also introduced.