Agent-based Tracking and Tracing for Controlling Fulfillment-processes in Supply Chains

Within inter-organizational supply chains decentralized planning spheres lead to new challenges for the tracking and tracing of the fulfillment process. Nevertheless, information about progress and delays for instance in production has to be gathered to plan and to control the supply chain activities. Due to decentralized planning there is a lack of central information about structure and schedule of the fulfillment process. Therefore, a tracking and tracing system has to combine on demand data out of dispersed databases. We present an approach based on autonomous software agents with reasoning capabilities in order to construct an efficient retrieval strategy. To ensure efficient communication and coordination between the software agents, an ontology will be developed to incorporate the needs of supply chain management but taking already available ontologies into account. Efficient retrieval on demand in complex systems leads to the need of generating an optimized retrieval plan under the conditions of minimized costs or retrieval time. A concept for this will also be proposed in this paper. DECENTRALIZED PLANNING IN SUPPLY CHAINS Decentralized planning-systems are becoming more and more popular. Examples in business administration can be found in all major functional areas, e.g. production (decentralized production planning systems (Corsten 1998)), distribution (decentralized transportation planning (Gomber et al. 1997)) and procurement (e.g. continuous replenishment concepts and supplier/vendor managed inventory concepts (Distel et al. 2000)). These developments are supported through changing organizational designs which are for instance reflected in the transformation from shop production with large batch sizes towards process-oriented segmentation of the production and smaller batch-sizes for more flexibility. Increased autonomy and responsibilities for the staffmembers are the consequences of these organizational changes which in turn lead to a need for more decentralized planning procedures. Focusing on individual enterprises as is implicitly done above falls short of the expectations which are associated with the concept of ”Supply Chain Management”, because it neglects the system in which an enterprise is embedded. ”Supply Chains” which are at the core of this concept represent a model which can be associated with the traditional economic view of value chains (Klaus 1998) but which reaches beyond the calculation of value added. It is the active configuration and management of a supply chain which is termed ”Supply Chain Management”. The following figure illustrates an example of a supply chain for textiles (see figure 1). In this example a company in Hong Kong receives an order from a customer specifying a shipment of clothes. yarn production (Korea) weaving (Taiwan) dying (Taiwan) zipper production (China) zipper wholesaler (Japan) design and coordination (Hongkong) distribution customer lead-time from order to delivery ~5 weeks (traditional supply chain ~13 weeks) order fabricate textile (Thailand, spreaded over five factories) flow of goods communication & coordination Figure 1: Example of a supply chain for textiles This company then starts coordinating numerous suppliers at different levels of the supply chain. The coordinating company only sets global dates and guarantees in advance the capacities reserved for this special order. It is important to notice that the suppliers are all independent companies and the Hong Kong based coordinator never uses more than 30% to 70% of the capacity of individual suppliers in order to keep them independent. But still this high-level coordination enables a reduction of lead times from order to delivery for the whole supply chain from 13 to five weeks, which results in a major competitive advantage for the participants of this supply chain (Magretta 1998). As was mentioned the suppliers are all independent companies. Therefore this supply chain, viewed as a single system, faces major planning tasks which are solved decentralized in each company individually. Only the coordination through the Hong Kong based company can be characterized as central planning but it remains on a very high level without detailed planning and scheduling of the fulfillment processes. TRACKING AND TRACING IN SUPPLY CHAINS