Order Fulfillment Monitoring in Agile Supply Chain by Software Agents

Nowadays, in turbulent and violate global markets, agility has been considered as a fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival. Consequently Agile Supply Chain is considered as a dominant competitive advantage. However, so far a little effort has been made for order fulfillment monitoring an agile supply chain in recent years. Therefore, in this study a fuzzy approach has been developed based on software agents’ technique. Software agents that gather event-related information are one promising approach to monitor a large number of different order fulfillment autonomously. Fuzzy logic provides mechanisms for heuristic human-like evaluated of these data. An agent-based concept is introduced that includes autonomous software for monitoring orders on the one hand and fuzzy logic mechanisms for analyzing order data on the other hand. A prototype implementation illustrates this concept. Results of evaluation experiments using this prototype system are presented.