Priority driven agent based retail supply chain management system

Abstract

Supply chain management involves planning and management of suppliers and retailers that are engaged in a business process. These entities operate in a distributed and interconnected complex world that manifests in ever-changing dynamic systems with lots of uncertainty. Those systems cannot be modeled by traditional techniques that assume the stability of a system during execution. In addressing the above issue, we have postulated a multi agent system to emulate process in supply chain management. The system is able to create multiple Agents upon the dynamic requests and enables passing messages to establish negotiations among agents to achieve the best deals to satisfy requirements of both suppliers and the retailers. The agents execute successfully or they could not compete, kill themselves and come up with better strategies again only when necessary, thereby saving the computing resources to execute the agent system. The system has been tested for various possible cases and found to be successful for modeling the complex domain of supply chain management.