Agent based design and simulation of supply chain systems

Abstract

Reports on the use of our own agent and coordination technology to model, design and simulate global, distributed supply chains. We show by non-trivial examples how supply chains can be naturally modeled, simulated and improved in this way, within a short development time and with reduced human resources. As the agent technology was primarily built for the implementation and control of distributed systems, the simulation models can be reused with minor modifications for actually controlling distributed supply chains. In this way, the presented agent technology gives us a powerful approach to life-cycle support of supply-chain information architectures.