Aligning inventory control decisions in decentralized supply chains

Inventory control decisions across supply chains are often decentralized but interdependent. This paper presents a cooperative model to align the inventory control decisions in decentralized supply chains. We model the supply chains as a multi-agent system based on J2EE(TM) technologies. The decision-making objective of this research is to minimize the supply chain's inventory costs taking into account the associated dependencies among different decision-makers, namely planning agents. The issues are transformed into a constraint satisfaction optimization problem (CSOP) which is then solved through the coordination of agents. The experimental results show that the model is effective.