Title: Supply chain management for virtual enterprises with adaptive multi-agent mechanism

Authors: Toshiya Kaihara, Susumu Fujii

Addresses: Department of Computer and Systems Engineering, Kobe University, Kobe, Hyogo 657-8501, Japan. ' Department of Computer and Systems Engineering, Kobe University, Kobe, Hyogo 657-8501, Japan

Abstract: Although cooperation is the fundamental characteristic of Virtual Enterprise (VE) concept, due to its distributed environment and the autonomous and heterogeneous nature of the VE members, cooperation can only be succeed if a proper management of dependencies between activities is in place. In this paper, we focus on negotiation process in VE formulation to clarify the effective VE management. Each enterprise in VE is defined as agent with multi utilities and a framework of multi-agent paradigm is newly proposed. We develop a computer simulation model, and clarify the supply chain formulation dynamism on the negotiation process with adaptive behaviour.

Keywords: supply chain management; SCM; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; virtual enterprises; reinforcement learning; game theory; negotiation process; simulation; supply chain formulation; adaptive agents.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMTM.2008.017729

International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 2008 Vol.14 No.3/4, pp.299 - 310

Published online: 28 Mar 2008 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article