The DARPA advanced logistics project

Abstract

Logistics deals with the problem of getting the right "stuff" (people, materials, supplies) to the right "place" at the right "time". Major transportation vendors such as Fedex, UPS, Emery Worldwide, require the efficient solution of logistics problems on a minute by minute basis. Major corporate organizations such as Ford and GM, need to keep inventories at optimal levels, while supporting the smooth inflow of production materials, and smooth outflow of finished products. During the last few years, it has been widely recognized that the next generation of logistics products will, in reality, be powerful information systems that manipulate massive, distributed, logistics databases, and enable logisticians to perform a variety of functions such as tracking the status of supplies and materials, planning based on the current status, efficiently tracking status changes as they occur, and replanning as needed in order to accomplish the mission(s) at hand. In 1996, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started an 80 million dollar research effort called the Advanced Logistics Project (ALP) aimed at developing the next generation of logistics systems. In this paper, we will describe the goals of ALP, describe the multi-agent logistics architecture proposed by ALP, and show how this architecture supports the achievement of ALP's goals.