Supply Chain Process and Agent Design for E-Commerce

Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today’s fast-paced, global business environment. But neither EDI nor Web-based supply chain applications can enable both the process integration and flexibility demanded in the business environment of today. In contrast, intelligent agents offer potential and capability for buyer-seller integration and flexibility, and early applications show great promise for supply chain integration through agent technology. However, agent technology remains relatively immature, and we have yet to establish, test and verify good design principles and techniques like those now well established for other, more conventional software technologies. The research described in this paper builds upon recent work on agent-based supply chain integration to propose a set of techniques and tools to integrate process and agent design for the supply chain in an e-commerce context. Preliminary results from implementation include successful development of a supply chain agent federation and demonstration of its effective performance in a socially-conforming manner along the supply chain. Implications of this work with respect to the e-commerce context include the potential for rapid agent development by end users themselves. And research along the lines of this investigation may have a profound impact on the manner in which e-commerce applications are designed and developed in the near future. 1. Supply chain development challenges Supply chain management represents a critical competency in today’s fast-paced, global business environment, and a number of effective practices (e.g., just-in-time deliveries, electronic data interchange (EDI), supplier inventory management) are employed to improve the competitiveness and efficiency of enterprises around the world. Our two decades of experience with EDI suggests commercial processes employed by buyers and sellers must be mutually compatible in order for business exchanges and transactions to occur effectively. And to support the kinds of rapid purchase and responsive order fulfillment required for e-commerce today, these buyer 0-7695-0493-0/00 and seller processes must also be closely integrated [16]. Presently, such integration is practically ensured through the kinds of rigid EDI links established between trading partners. However, the dynamic, unpredictable business environment of today further demands considerable process flexibility along the supply chain, as a firm’s set of commercial suppliers, customers, trading partners and even strategic allies—together defining its supply chain topology—may now shift both abruptly and frequently. EDI does not offer the flexibility required to accommodate such abrupt and frequent change, nor does it conform to accommodate the diverse and idiosyncratic preferences and work habits of specific individuals within the organization. Thus, many firms are turning their attention toward Web-based support for commercial transactions (e.g., intranets/extranets, electronic catalogs and storefronts, virtual malls). Unfortunately, even such Web-based e-commerce applications do not satisfy these joint requirements for process integration and flexibility, as most Web-based supply chain technologies are developed predominately for either the buyer or seller, but not both; that is, they fail to closely integrate buyer and seller processes. A relatively novel stream of research follows [1] and others (e.g., [2, 7, 15, 17]) to argue intelligent agents offer potential and capability for buyer-seller integration and flexibility. In other words, software agents developed specifically for the supply chain may support the ability to closely integrate buyer and seller processes as well as provide sufficient flexibility to keep-up with changes to supply chain topologies and operations, in addition to being tailorable to meet the diverse needs, preferences and work habits of individuals in the organization. For instance, individual agents can be endowed with sufficient intelligence to act autonomously in certain circumstances and be empowered make responsible decisions on behalf their principals. This enables such agents to faithfully represent their principals’ interests in commerce, as opposed to simply retrieving product information or executing user-directed purchase transactions. These latter, limited capabilities are characteristic of most e-commerce applications in use today. Individual agents are also easily conformable to $10.00 (c) 2000 IEEE 1 Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2000 their users’ preferences, and intelligent agents can be easily cloned, specialized and adapted to accommodate various business practices of new or changing suppliers, customers and other trading partners. This offers flexibility unparalleled by extant object-oriented, clientserver and distributed systems employed in this domain. Moreover, groups of agents participating in multi-agent systems can collaborate through federations to solve problems too large or complex for individuals to address by themselves. This supports close coupling and tight integration between buyer and seller organizations. But despite these potential advantages, agent technology remains relatively immature, and we have yet to establish, test and verify good design principles and techniques (cf. [19]) like those now well established for object-oriented design, client-server development, expert systems implementation and other, more mature technological areas. And most agent applications today are developed by people with doctorates in computer science, as opposed to buyers and sellers in the enterprise (e.g., business managers and professionals). This situation is similar in many respects to the early days of expert systems, most notably before the advent of expert system “shells” to facilitate rapid application development. The research described in this paper builds upon recent work on agent-based supply chain integration to propose a set of techniques and tools to integrate process and agent design for the supply chain in an e-commerce context. To demonstrate the use and utility of this proposed approach, such techniques and tools are employed and discussed with respect to a proof-ofconcept agent federation designed and developed specifically for enterprise supply chain integration. The structured, graphical nature of these techniques and tools provides some indication the task of agent development may become less onerous and demanding, particularly as the corresponding developmental technologies continue to mature. Paralleling advances enabled by expert system shell tools, this offers the prospect of reducing both the skill level and cycle time required to develop agent applications. In the sections that follow, we first provide some background information pertaining to intelligent agents. We then describe an integrated approach to supply chain process and corresponding agent design. Some preliminary results from design and implementation using these techniques and tools are discussed in turn. The paper then summarizes key conclusions and presents a number of suggestions for future research along these lines. 2. Intelligent agent background Work in the area of software agents has been ongoing for some time, and it addresses a broad array of a t s a b F a b a c o s i p a d e O a c r r b b c m a a “ o a e a i e a f p e f