A decision support system for inventory control using planning and distributed agents

Agent Technology has become very popular in the last few years as a new approach to developing software systems. Multi Agent Systems (MAS), a term used to describe the incorporation of multiple types of agents into various systems, is a way of designing and implementing a system with the advantages of agent entities. We chose to use agents as a decision support tool for use in a Retail Inventory Management System. Since the management of inventory is crucial to the success of most companies, and since we see a potential major role for agents in the business process management MAS seems a likely choice for a decision support platform. This work stems from our prior work in simulating a MAS inventory system, then implementing the system for production use.