A multi-agent model integrating inventory and routing processes

Abstract

The increasing changing rate of the marketplace forces the enterprise to face the complexity with new organizational paradigms like virtual enterprise or extended enterprise. These organizational paradigms bring in consideration coordination and integration issues of different DSS designed to solve different problems. In this paper we analyze the problem of a logistics operator which need to route goods to customers. Customers have different preferences on the time of delivery based on their resource management policies. In our work we use a multi-agent model in which agents use classic techniques to solve single problems and through coordination try to optimize the global goal of minimization of logistic service operator and customer costs. In the architecture we designed, there is an agent that solves the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Window constraints representing the interests of the logistic service operator. Another agent uses an algorithm to determine the cost function of goods picking at delivery point based on resource management policy of delivery point. A Third agent asks to the two agents for solving different instances of the single problems and tries to match solution using multi-criteria techniques. The model was implemented and tested on real case of an Italian logistic service operator. Some results and comparisons are presented. © 2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.