Decentralised production-distribution planning system using collaborative agents in supply chain network

With the fast development of information technology and the global market, collaboration between different functional units in a supply chain becomes one of the most critical factors for global companies to respond to rapid changes in customer needs and increase the efficiency of the whole supply chain. This supply chain environment requires a production-distribution planning system to enable the collaboration between production and distribution units more quickly and orderly. Generally, collaboration in a supply chain needs to resolve conflicts between two decentralised functional units, because each unit tries to locally minimise its own costs, not the overall supply chain costs. Also, there exists incomplete information sharing according to the information privacy of each functional unit. This paper proposes a decentralised production-distribution planning system using collaborative agents that can efficiently mediate the planning gaps between two decentralised planning functions: production and distribution. The validity of collaborative-agent model has been shown using some lemmas and numerical examples.