Agent Technology Application in Automating the Coordination and Decision-Making in Supply Chain

Coordinating all the activities among all the parties involved in supply chain can be a daunting task. This paper put forth the viewpoint of applying agent technology to automate the coordination and decision-making tasks in a typical home PC industry supply chain. The main features of the proposed approach, which differentiate it from other approaches, are the following:① In the prototype, the coordination agents have both cooperation and competition patterns; ② It uses JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Framework) as the agent development environment to realize efficient and reusable agent software;③ It produces some innovative models for the business processes and issues faced by parties in the supply chain. A prototype and the overall process flow were also described.