Decision Making in Logistics: A Chaos Theory Based Analysis

Information Refinement and Revision for Decision Making: Modeling for Diagnostics, Prognostics, and Prediction

Volume

Papers from the 2002 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Logistics in general is a complex system. In this paper we investigate the existence of chaos in logistics systems. Such an investigation is necessary to use appropriate and correct methods for further analysis, as linear systems techniques will not be useful. If a system exhibits chaos, decision making should consider the system characterization parameters from a chaos theory perspective. In this paper, three models from the existing literature are reported. Of these models, the non-preemptive queuing model is considered for further exploration. A prototypical supply chain example is used and the resulting behavior is characterized. At certain input values the behavior of the logistics system exhibits chaos. This information is useful for further analysis for predication and control. The working prototype is implemented in the DARPA Couggar agent architecture.