Agent-Facilitated Real-Time Flexible Supply Chain Structuring

Electronic commerce and the vast amounts of real-time information available through means of EDI and the Internet are reshaping the way enterprises conduct business. A new computational infrastructure and models are needed for a business to gain a competitive edge through effective use of this information base. In this paper, we develop a model of inter-organizational electronic commerce that explores various new choices and opportunities that the electronic marketplace offers. We explicitly address two major performance measures of supply chains—time and cost—in a unified fashion. In our work, we model different business entities as autonomous software agents interconnected via the Internet. The main research focus of our efforts is how to coordinate software agents in supply chains dynamically and flexibly such that goods and services can be delivered at the right time in a cost-effective manner.