Collaboration in supply chain: a multi-agent approach

Supply chain collaboration has become a critical success factor for supply chain management. Supply chain collaboration builds on information sharing, collaborative planning and execution. Many information systems have been developed for supply chain management. However, these systems do not sufficiently support collaborative supply chain. Recently, intelligent agent technology has received a great potential in supporting transparency in information flows and modeling the dynamic supply chain for collaborative supply chain. This paper explores the similarities between multi-agent system and supply chain to investigate the appropriateness of multi-agent based technology to model supply chain system and support collaborative supply chain planning and execution. In addition, the framework of the multi-agent-based collaborative supply chain management system will be presented.