Interaction of Software Agents in the Problem of Coordinating Orders

This article considers one of supply chain problems-procurement and inventory management. As part of this task, the main problem is the coordination of an order between the supplier and customer, in particular, the timely coordination of the name and number of component parts, prices, and delivery time. The current manual approach has a number of disadvantages related to noncompliance with the production plan, which cause financial losses. To automate this process, we propose a multiagent software system. The choice of approach is caused by the properties of agent systems-autonomy, pro-activeness, sociability, and reactivity. Agents communicate via message exchange with reference to the common ontology for agents participating in the negotiations. This ontology forms the basis of interaction between agents and means of structuring domain knowledge allows software agents to share available knowledge and identify new knowledge. The object of study is an enterprise that produces microchips. Software agents are developed within the JADE platform.