Study on coordination in multi-agent-based agile supply chain management

One of the most important tasks of the agile supply chain management(ASCM) is to reconfigure a supply chain quickly based on the customers' requirement. Without more sophisticated cooperation and dynamic formation in an agile supply chain, it cannot achieved for mass customization, rapid response and high quality services. Because of its great potential in supporting cooperation for the supply chain management, agent technology can carry out the cooperative work by inter-operation across networked human, organization and machines at the abstractive level in a computational system. A major challenge in building such a system is to coordinate the behavior of individual agent or a group of agents to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants. In this paper, the agent technology is used to support modeling and coordinating of supply chain management. Because two types of agents, namely cooperated agents and self-interested agents, are used in the supply chain, their characteristics are analyzed and then two different methods are put forward for the solutions, that is the distributed scheduling and centered making decision(DSCM) for cooperated agents and the hierarchical distributed coordination (HDC) for self-interested agents.