A-TEAM BASED SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

Today's supply chains increasingly involve complex sets of processes, objectives and constraints, and therefore agent-based architectures for supply chain management (SCM) become much more difficult to implement and maintain. The paper presents a multi-agent architecture for specifying, analyzing and developing SCM systems, in which asynchronous teams (A-Team) of problem solving agents exchange results within populations that provide effective management of information flows in supply chains, and cooperate to produce sets of non-dominated solutions that show the tradeoffs between objectives. Our approach distinguishes itself by improving problem-solving efficiency based on a diverse set of algorithms without complicated synthesis efforts, removing the focus from agent communication and coordination details, and improving reusability, flexibility and extensibility by supporting object-oriented and component-based programming style. We examine the effectiveness of the architecture through a real-world case study and experimental results.