Intelligent Agents For Supply Chain Management

Intelligent Agents For Supply Chain Management

ABSTRACT:

Since the introduction of computer into the workplace there has been an expectation that the manager could push a button and the computer would magically churn out results that humans painfully labour over.

Enter, Computers, a splendid tool for manual and predefined, pre-programmed tasks without ay human intervention as such. However, the yearning for more has made humans expect more and more intelligence from a dumb information pre-programmed box.

Enter, Artificial Intelligence, the perfect solution to boom the processing power of the computer with intelligence of its own – so that it thinks like what we do and reacts more intelligently to situations. However, yet the user expects that much of his manual and tedious or repetitive tasks (like form filling for a net surfer, records generation from a data for a accountant, effective and quick searching etc...) be done without much hindrance and at the click of a button.

Enter, Intelligent Agents, powered by artificial intelligence and programmed for highly subjective operation these agents work to furnish the automated tasks. However, they are highly subjective and hence rely upon each other for extended operations, thus forming a Multi Agent System.

Supply Chain Management is a unique system wherein establishment, breaking and maintenance of Supply Chains is practiced to enforce higher gains, lower inventory, higher collaborative work power – all with the existing infrastructure and facilities and still realizing that Customer Satisfaction is the only motive that the Supply Chain needs to aim at finally.

Working on the principles of optimizing Production, Supply, Inventory, Location, Transportation and Information for every Supply Chain, it tends to achieve its aims by a highly collaborative and shared infrastructure.

However, Supply Chains being more or less structurally static and their management more routine and rule-driven than innovative, one always thinks of automating them.

Enter, Multi Agent Systems for Supply Chain Management, powered by Multi Agent architectures and enjoying the benefits of Supply Chain Management, MAS for SCM perform the high-end task of maintaining and evolving Supply Chains and Supply Chain infrastructures to accommodate the goals aforesaid, more efficiently and quickly.

This paper shall mainly deal with the topics briefed above, their implementation overviews, and finally suggest some implementation issues to bring SCM and MAS under a single roof – Multi Agent System for Supply Chain Management!!


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