Modeling warehouse logistics using agent organizations

Abstract

Warehouse management systems are traditionally highly optimized to a specific situation and do not provide the flexibility required in contemporary business environments. Agents are advocated to provide adaptiveness and flexibility, and have been used to solve specific problems in the warehouse logistics domain. However, for creating a general warehouse management system, it is not clear for developers how and when to implement them. In this paper, we describe many of the design decisions when constructing a warehouse management system, and illustrate how and when agents (and agent-organizations) are useful. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.