Improving Client Service Reliability in Collaborative Supply Chains: A Mas Scheduler

Abstract

The theory of network coordination provides a theoretical basis to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across supply chains. In particular, this paper focuses on Collaborative Scheduling, a collaboration process whereby Supply Chain trading partners activate on-line inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan key activities, from production and delivery of raw materials to production and delivery of final products to end customers.By discussing a case study of ceramic tile the paper provides a theoretical framework that contributes to explaining the relations between inter-firm coordination mechanisms and the characteristics of interdependence among the actors involved in the implementation. To automate the coordination process a generalized agent-based framework that uses negotiation to dynamically schedule events is presented. Events can be created dynamically and event may potentially require collaboration or resources from one or more other actors/agents. The allocation of resources to the event will be negotiated iteratively until a compromise is found. The framework consists of a user preference model, an evaluation or utility function, and a negotiation protocol.KeywordsSupply ChainMultiagent SystemManage Business ProcessCeramic TileOrder ManagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.