From supply chain formation to multi-agent coordination

Supply Chain Formation is the process of determining the participants in a supply chain, who will exchange what with whom, and the terms of the exchanges. Decentralized supply chain formation appears as a highly intricate task because agents only possess local information and have limited knowledge about the capabilities of other agents. The decentralized supply chain formation problem has been recently cast as an optimization problem that can be efficiently approximated using max-sum loopy belief propagation. This mapping can be improved by encoding the problem into a binary factor graph (containing only binary variables) and deriving model-specific equations for max-sum. First, this paper introduces the state-of-the art methods for decentralized supply chain formation. Second, it presents future shortterm lines of research in this problem. Finally, it argues that the binary model can be extended to other problems than that of the supply chain formation.