Agent-Based Supply Chain Integration

Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today's fast-paced, global business environment. However, in the current transition from EDI to Web-based supply chain technologies, much of the capability for process integration is being lost. And the integration of buyer and seller supply chain processes is critical for speed and responsiveness in today's hypercompetitive product and service markets. Intelligent agent technology offers the potential to overcome many limitations of current supply chain technologies. This paper presents intelligent supply chain agents that represent and autonomously conduct business on behalf of product users, buyers and vendors. We classify and present numerous extant agent applications and extend a technological framework to compare and contrast intelligent agents with other classes of information technology. We then describe an agent-based supply chain process design, along with its developmental techniques, and the structure and behavior of an agent federation used for integration in a major enterprise. We present results of this exploratory research in terms of technical feasibility and process performance in the enterprise context. This work is novel in that it integrates process-level knowledge from operational enterprises with distributed agent technologies. And it makes a contribution by demonstrating how agent-based supply chain integration can be effected along a large-scale, operational, inter-organizational process.