Improving client service reliability in collaborative supply chains: A mas scheduler

Abstract

The theory of network coordination provides a theoretical basis to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across supply chains. In particular, this paper focuses on Collaborative Scheduling, a collaboration process whereby Supply Chain trading partners activate on-line inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan key activities, from production and delivery of raw materials to production and delivery of final products to end customers. By discussing a case study of ceramic tile the paper provides a theoretical framework that contributes to explaining the relations between interfirm coordination mechanisms and the characteristics of interdependence among the actors involved in the implementation. To automate the coordination process a generalized agent-based framework that uses negotiation to dynamically schedule events is presented. Events can be created dynamically and event may potentially require collaboration or resources from one or more other actors/agents. The allocation of resources to the event will be negotiated iteratively until a compromise is found. The framework consists of a user preference model, an evaluation or utility function, and a negotiation protocol. © 2005 by International Federation for Information Processing.