Coordination of supply chain activities: A coalition-based approach

Abstract

Companies operate in an environment increasingly demanding in terms of flexibility and reactivity. The introduction of the entities resulting from Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in the management of enterprises prove to be an interesting technology to simulate and reproduce the collaborative and adaptive behaviors of enterprises. This article models the coordination of the various collaborative parties both inside and outside a supply chain using coordination methods of MAS mainly coalition formation mechanisms. In this paper, we present our agent modeling of supply chains, and then we detail the coalition formation algorithm. Lastly, we illustrate our approach with an example chosen in the industrial domain. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.