A Multi-Agent Distributed Framework for Collaborative Transportation Planning

Abstract

Today enterprises are organized in networks of several distributed production sites in a geographical area more and more extended, where sites use the intermediary products of other sites to manufacture the final products. Therefore they transport raw materials and intermediate products between plants for manufacturing. Additionally these enterprises have to distribute their final products to far away consumers. In this context, it is difficult and not cost effective for these enterprises to manage their own transport vehicles. Thus they outsource their transportation tasks to third party logistics enterprises. These enterprises group transport orders of multiple enterprises together in order to reduce cost and travels number. The objective of this paper is to present a distributed architecture planning of transportation activities aimed at better utilize transport resources by grouping several orders of transport for each effective displacement.