A Logistics Management System Based On Intelligent Agents

Inventory management is important in supply chain management. Experience in the developed country reveals that the historic development of supply chain management is the gradually reduction of the inventory cost.Inventory cost reduction thus has attracted tremendous attention. Inventory management is the hub in the supply chain management that links vendors, the upstream, and production firms, the downstream. Effective inventory management can reduce the overall cost of the whole supply chain.A warehouse usually has thousands of inventories, which may supplied by vendors located from everywhere of the country. The traditional manual approaches in material ordering, purchasing and stock taking are time consuming and inefficient. An intelligent Agent is autonomous, social and reactive, as an agent can operate without the direct intervention of humans and has control over its actions and internal state, an agent can cooperates with humans or other agents in order to achieve tasks, and an agent can perceive its environment and responds in a timely fashion to changes that occur in the environment. Hence, multi-agent system (MAS) is an excellent paradigm for coordinating and managing inventories.MAS has been deployed in inventory management since late of 1990s. But, it seems that little research has been conducted in China. Hence, the aim of this study is to introduce Agent technology to manage inventory in this country, utilizing its characteristics such as agent initiative interaction,responsively,autonomous etc. By definition different Agent, it aims to realize seamless connection between enterprise alternately, and achieves the goal of reducing and even eliminating the stock.This study develops a MAS based inventory management system. The main contents are on three counts. The first is the analysis of possible benefits of deploying the agent technology in inventory management. The second is the proposing of the architecture of the multi-Agent system inventory management. The last is to design the contract net agreement for multi-Agent cooperation strategy, and it is based on the request of the inventory management.