An advanced agent-based order planning system for dynamic networked enterprises

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in exploring the opportunities for competitive advantage that arise from reinforcing core competencies and innovative capabilities of the individual companies, and by forming integrated supply networks. In complex and dynamic environments such as the automotive and semiconductor industries, managing and co-ordinating the procurement of materials, their transformation into intermediate and finished products, and the distribution to the final customers, are very demanding tasks in terms of information systems. In general, current available software packages do not provide the full support needed for networked and distributed organizations, and are clearly insufficient in what concerns the planning and coordination activities needed in these heterogeneous environments. In order to adequately tackle these problems, this work proposes a multi-agent system architecture for real-time customer-order planning in distributed manufacturing enterprises, addressing the requirements of a make-to-order environment.  The present research work resulted from the Co-OPERATE European Project. Enhanced visibility of information, early warning of disturbances, synchronized production and collaborative planning in the supply chain are the general goals of the project. In particular, for aggregate planning and order promising, a distributed and decentralized information system, based on an architecture of agents and extensively using the internet, was designed and implemented. This system aims at responding to the basic requirements of cooperativeness, integration and configurability, and at providing new and more powerful decision support.

Keywords:

• Networked enterprises
• Supply-chain management
• Multi-agent systems
• Decision support systems
• Production planning and control

Acknowledgments

Américo L. Azevedo has a PhD in the area of advanced planning systems for networking enterprises. Since 1988, he has been teaching Electrical and Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering in the University of Porto, and since 1995 he has been Researcher and Project leader in INESC Porto. His main research interests are in the Virtual Enterprises and Organizations, Integrated Manufacturing area, Industrial Organization and in Production Planning and Operations Management.

César Toscano has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Engineering Faculty, University of Porto (1985). Currently, he is Senior Technician in the Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit of INESC Porto. Among previous positions, he was Scientific Associate in CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (1988). He participated in several R&D European projects: B-MAN, Business Mobile Agent Network, MyFashion.eu, Co-OPERATE, and X-CITTIC. He has interests in Information Systems Development, Systems Architecture, Distributed Systems, Enterprise Integration, Enterprise Modelling and Supply-chain Management.

Jorge P. Sousa has a PhD in Operational Research from the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium (1989). He is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto and Researcher at INESC Porto, leader of the area on ‘Collaborative Business’. He has participated in European projects such as X-CITTIC, Co-OPERATE, EXPIDE, THINKcreative and COMPANION and has published papers in several international journals. Main areas of research: Decision Support Systems, Combinatorial Optimization, Operations Management, Enterprise Networks and Virtual Organizations.

António L. Soares has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1998). He is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto and researcher at INESC Porto. His research work has been in the areas of socio-technical design of information systems, requirements engineering and information systems for manufacturing applications. His current research interests lie in the analysis and design of socio-technical networks, in the application of social models to the modelling of socio-technical networks and in collaborative business.