Agent-based Collaborative Supply Net Management [chapter]

Bernd Scholz-Reiter, Hartmut Höhns
2003 Collaborative Systems for Production Management  
Supply chain management means the coordination of all material and information flows throughout the entire value chain. The main goal is to organise the overall process of the supply chain to achieve an optimum in costs and time, for example, by improving the following four Figures, such as increasing capacity utilization, decreasing inventories, decreasing lead time and increasing delivery reliability and adherence to delivery dates. The conventional control of supply chains pursuit top-down
more » ... anning approaches to coordinate the supply flows (incl. material and infom1ation), run by current ERP systems, between the different enterprises participating in a supply network. Collaborative supply net management has technological and non-technological aspects. From the non-teclmological point, aside from willingness to organisational changes, a feeling of tmstful partnership must evolve. On the technological side, agent technology is proposed as being indispensable to achieve integration of Advanced Planning Systems (APS) across company borders. Thus, this paper proposes an agent-based approach to collaborative supply net management, based on the SCOR-Model (Supply chain Operations Reference-mode!). Finally an example is given that sketches the idea of an agent-based simulation approach to tackle the bullwhip effect Keywords Collaborative Supply Chain Management, multi-agent systems, SCOR-Model. H. S. Jagdev et al. (eds.), Collaborative Systems for Production Management
doi:10.1007/978-0-387-35698-3_1 fatcat:hm4wqc33yrgobc6owioqdmeck4