Agent-oriented supply-chain management

The supply chain is a worldwide network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, and delivered to customers. In recent years, a new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged. It views the supply chain as composed of a set of intelligent software agents, each responsible for one or more activities in the supply chain and each interacting with other agents in the planning and execution of their responsibilities. This paper investigates issues and presents solutions for the construction of such an agent-oriented software architecture. The approach relies on the use of an agent building shell, providing generic, reusable, and guaranteed components and services for communicative-act-based communication, conversational coordination, role-based organization modeling, and others. Using these components, we show two nontrivial agent-based supply-chain architectures able to support complex cooperative work and the management of perturbation caused by stochastic events in the supply chain.