Abstract: A supply chain may be considered as a group of organizations, connected by a series of trading relationships. This group covers the logistics and manufacturing activities from raw materials to the final consumer. Each organization in the chain procures and then transforms materials into intermediate/final products, and distributes these to customers. Thus, the supply chain is a network linking and interweaving different supply chains of all the companies involved in a production process. The content of supply chain management with in a firm varies considerably with the type of business. Procurement and distribution of products of any business are the two vital functions. In this paper, an attempt to integrate these two functions is done. It incorporates quantity discounts and freight policies for multi items that are perishable in nature, which are supplied from single source to single destinations under fuzzy environment. It is assumed that, single source or a supplier is offering various discounts on the purchase of quantity and are supplying to a destination. A transporter hired by the buyer also offers different policies to choose on distribution of products, thereby buyer is enticed by dual benefit on procurement as well as distribution. A fuzzy optimization problem is converted to crisp mathematical programming problem using triangular membership function. The problem is solved and a case is presented to validate the model.

Abstract: We describe a multiagent self-organizing scheme to search for specific structures and substructures, that are included within the generic (Markush) chemical structure expressions in a chemical patent database. This scheme is highly concurrent, since only the local compatibility conditions are checked, by a set of cooperating agents.