Intra-Organizational Logistics Management Through Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Compared to inter-organizational logistics management, the goal of intra-organizational logistics management is to maximize the profits of the whole company sometimes at the cost of its individual units' profits. While many agent-based models have been proposed for logistics management, most of these models use an auction approach. Thus, they are not suitable for intra-organizational logistics management. In this paper, we first formulate logistics management as a distributed resource allocation problem. Then, we present our ongoing work on developing a multi-agent model for intra-organizational logistics management and using Lagrangian relaxation to decompose the problem into a set of subproblems. Our initial experimental results are very promising. We provide a detailed analysis of our results.