Adaptive demand peak management in online transport process planning

We investigate the common and integrated dynamic decision making of the coordinator of a supply chain consortium together with a subordinate fleet managing agent offering transport services for the consortium. While the fleet manager aims at minimizing the costs of the generated transport processes, the goal of the coordinator is to keep the reliability and stability of the processes on a reasonable level. It aims to synchronize the transport processes with upstream and downstream parts of the supply chain. The major innovation presented in this article is a framework that controls and adjusts the decision competence distribution between the two planning agents with respect to the current transport process performance. If the transport process timeliness is endangered to fall below a given threshold and thereby the overall supply chain reliability tends to sink, the coordinator is temporarily granted the right to intervene into the planning of the fleet managing agent. Within simulation experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed system is able to increase the reliability of the generated transport processes. We show that the intervention of the superior coordinator agent during workload peaks ensures higher process timeliness than the transport service providing agent is able to achieve without any coordinator interventions.