How do contractors decide whether to accept a contract?

Contractors decide whether or not they will accept the contract by running their own scheduling engine with the input provided by logistics.

What is the role of an order acquisition agent?

This agent is responsible for acquiring orders from customers; negotiating with customers about prices, due dates, and the like; and handling customer requests for modifying or canceling their orders.

What is the role of a logistics agent?

A logistics agent coordinates the work of several plants and transportation agents, while interacting with the customer in the process of negotiating the execution of an order.

Where does logistics monitor the activities of the contractors?

After having started execution, the authors move to state contractors-committed, where logistics monitors the activities of the contractors.

Open AccessBook Chapter10.1007/978-1-4615-1599-9_5

Agent-Oriented Supply-Chain Management

Mark S. Fox, +2 more

- 01 Jan 2001

- International Journal of Flexible Manufa...

- Vol. 12, Iss: 2, pp 81-104

565

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate issues and presents solutions for the construction of an agent-oriented software architecture for the supply chain, which relies on the use of a building shell, providing generic, reusable, and guaranteed components and services for communicative-act-based communication, conversational coordination, role-based organization modeling, and others.

Abstract: The supply chain is a worldwide network of suppliers, factories, warehouses, distribution centers, and retailers through which raw materials are acquired, transformed, and delivered to customers In recent years, a new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged It views the supply chain as composed of a set of intelligent software agents, each responsible for one or more activities in the supply chain and each interacting with other agents in the planning and execution of their responsibilities This paper investigates issues and presents solutions for the construction of such an agent-oriented software architecture The approach relies on the use of an agent building shell, providing generic, reusable, and guaranteed components and services for communicative-act-based communication, conversational coordination, role-based organization modeling, and others Using these components, we show two nontrivial agent-based supply-chain architectures able to support complex cooperative work and the management of perturbation caused by stochastic events in the supply chain

AI Agents for this Paper

Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps

Most frequently asked questions

1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" ?

This paper investigates issues and presents solutions for the construction of such an agent-oriented software architecture.. Using these components, the authors show two nontrivial agent-based supply-chain architectures able to support complex cooperative work and the management of perturbation caused by stochastic events in the

2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" ?

The authors have contributed a model of the new type of coordination knowledge as complex, coordination enhanced plans involving interactions by communicative action.. Although the number of applications the authors built as well as the number of users of their system both are limited, the evidence they have so far shows that their approach is promising in terms of naturalness of the coordination model, effectiveness of the representation and power, and usability of the provided programming tools.

3. What are the main factors that drive the system away from any existing schedule?

Modifications to customer orders (at the customer’s request), resource unavailabilities from suppliers, and machine breakdown all drive the system away from any existing predictive schedule.

4. What is the meaning of conversation plans?

In their applications, the authors also use conversation plans to describe local decision making; for example, based on using local solvers (e.g. constraint based schedulers) or other decisionmaking tools available to agents.

Figure 3. Using value iteration to reorder rules.

Figure 8. Effects of computer box plant breakdown, all cases.

Figure 9. Effects of motherboard plant breakdown, all cases.

Figure 2. Graph representation of customer conversation.

Citations

Journal Article•10.1016/J.EJOR.2004.03.001

Supply chain management and advanced planning : basics, overview and challenges

Hartmut Stadtler

- 16 Jun 2005

- European Journal of Operational Research

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors extract the essence of SCM and advanced planning in the form of two conceptual frameworks: the house of supply chain management and the supply chain planning matrix.

...read moreread less

824

•Journal Article•10.1016/J.CIRP.2006.10.004

Agent-based systems for manufacturing

László Monostori, +4 more

- 01 Jan 2006

- Cirp Annals-manufacturing Technology

TL;DR: The evolution of agent technologies and manufacturing will probably proceed hand in hand and the former can receive real challenges from the latter, which will have more and more benefits in applying agent technologies, presumably together with well-established or emerging approaches of other disciplines.

...read moreread less

737

•Journal Article•10.1016/J.IJPE.2005.09.001

Models for production planning under uncertainty: A review ☆

Josefa Mula, +3 more

- 01 Sep 2006

- International Journal of Production Econ...

TL;DR: This paper reviews some of the existing literature of production planning under uncertainty and provides a starting point about uncertainty modelling in production planning problems aimed at production management researchers.

...read moreread less

728

Journal Article•10.1080/0020754031000069625

The impacts of sharing production information on supply chain dynamics: A review of the literature

George Q. Huang, +2 more

- 01 Jan 2003

- International Journal of Production Rese...

TL;DR: In this article, a review of research into the impacts of sharing production information on the supply chain dynamics is presented, and a loose reference framework is proposed to reflect major elements commonly involved in this type of research, including the decision level investigated, supply chain structure, research questions addressed, factors involved, and findings and insights from the managerial perspective obtained.

...read moreread less

541

•Journal Article

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

G. van Valkenhoef, +4 more

- 01 Jan 2010

- Springer US

TL;DR: In this paper, the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and businessto-business (b2B) aspects, is surveyed and analyzed.

...read moreread less

459

...

Expand

References

•Book

How to do things with words

John Langshaw Austin

- 01 Jan 1962

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors presented a series of lectures with the following topics: Lecture I * Lecture II* Lecture III * Lectures IV* Lectures V * LectURE VI * LectURES VI * LII * LIII * LIV * LVI * LIX

...read moreread less

15.9K

•Book

Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming

Martin L. Puterman

- 15 Apr 1994

TL;DR: Puterman as discussed by the authors provides a uniquely up-to-date, unified, and rigorous treatment of the theoretical, computational, and applied research on Markov decision process models, focusing primarily on infinite horizon discrete time models and models with discrete time spaces while also examining models with arbitrary state spaces, finite horizon models, and continuous time discrete state models.

...read moreread less

12.3K

•Monograph•10.1002/9780470316887

Markov Decision Processes

P. Whittle, +1 more

- 15 Apr 1994

- Journal of The Royal Statistical Society...

TL;DR: Markov Decision Processes covers recent research advances in such areas as countable state space models with average reward criterion, constrained models, and models with risk sensitive optimality criteria, and explores several topics that have received little or no attention in other books.

...read moreread less

11K

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence

P. Brezillon, +1 more

- 01 Jan 1999

TL;DR: The topics in LNAI include automated reasoning, automated programming, algorithms, knowledge representation, agent-based systems, intelligent systems, expert systems, machine learning, natural-language processing, machine vision, robotics, search systems, knowledge discovery, data mining, and related programming languages.

...read moreread less

7.5K

Journal Article•10.1016/0004-3702(90)90055-5

Intention is choice with commitment

Philip R. Cohen, +1 more

- 03 Mar 1990

- Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore principles governing the rational balance among an agent's beliefs, goals, actions, and intentions, and show how agents can avoid intending all the foreseen side-effects of what they actually intend.

...read moreread less

2.1K

...

Expand

Agent-Oriented Supply-Chain Management

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper

Most frequently asked questions

1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" ?

2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Agent-oriented supply-chain management" ?

3. What are the main factors that drive the system away from any existing schedule?

4. What is the meaning of conversation plans?

5. How do contractors decide whether to accept a contract?

6. What is the role of an order acquisition agent?

7. What is the role of a logistics agent?

8. Where does logistics monitor the activities of the contractors?

Figures

Citations

Supply chain management and advanced planning : basics, overview and challenges

Agent-based systems for manufacturing

Models for production planning under uncertainty: A review ☆

The impacts of sharing production information on supply chain dynamics: A review of the literature

Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce

References

How to do things with words

Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming

Markov Decision Processes

Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence

Intention is choice with commitment

Related Papers (5)

Modeling Supply Chain Dynamics: A Multiagent Approach

Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice

Information distortion in a supply chain: the bullwhip effect

The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning in Factored POMDPs