An agent-based web service approach for supply chain collaboration

Abstract Despite the potential benefits the Internet and other related technologies offer, current supply chain management techniques do not take full advantage of these benefits. E-business environments provide a facilitating infrastructure for solving the issues concerning the traditional supply chain, such as the scalability and flexibility for the efficient collaboration between partners. Both internal and external uncertainties to the supply chain can hinder collaboration between partners, and thus also hinder their ability to achieve their best possible performance. This research proposes using agent-based web services to better support collaboration within a supply chain. An advantage of agent-based web services is that they combine the strengths of both web services and multi-agents. Two different collaboration situations are used in order to demonstrate the flexibility of the system. Scalability is demonstrated when the supply chain faces changes in the partnership candidates. Simulation methods are used in order to validate the feasibility of this approach, and statistical tests reveal the robustness of the experimental results across diverse uncertainties.