A Multi-Agent Architecture for a Dynamic Supply Chain Management

All Papers

Supply chain management (SCM) is a very challenging problem that is leveraging the e-commerce explosion. Today’s supply chains are essentially static, because they rely on long-term relationships among key trading partners. Dynamic practices are vital because they offer better matches between suppliers and customers as market conditions change. This paper presents a flexible architecture for dealing with the next generation of SCM problems, based on a distributed multi-agent architecture of a dynamic supply chain. We define intelligent agent roles that tackle sub problems of a dynamic SCM. We also present an implementation of this architecture used in the international test bed for SCM solutions, the Trading Agent SCM competition, as well as some experimental results.