Chaib-draa Brahim, Muller Jörg P. (eds.) Multiagent-based Supply Chain Management

Springer, 2006. — 440 p.Nowadays the agent technology is present in many industries including concurrent engineering, collaborative engineering design, manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, material handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. Supply chain management is concerned with planning and scheduling the different activities of organization across the supply chain, from raw material procurement to complete finished goods delivery. Such management is became vital today to the competitiveness of entreprises since it impacts their agility to meet changing market demands.The area intersecting supply chains management with multiagent systems has attracted in the last decade books, workshops, conferences, etc. Recently however, multiagent systems have became more formal borrowing from operations research, game theory and other facets from distributed decision making. The authors takes a close look at what has been done recently in the field of supply chain management using agent technology and more specifically multiagent systems. The book contains sixteen chapters organized in four main parts; Introductory Papers; Multiagent Based Supply Chain Modeling, Collaboration and Coordination Between Agents in a Supply Chain and Multiagent Based Supply Chain Management: Applications. This book is intended as reference material for researchers, graduate students, and practitioners alike who are interested in pursuing research and development in this area, and who need for that, a comprehensive view of the existing literature, and some ideas for future directions.