Agent-Based Cooperative Optimization of Integrated Production and Distribution Planning

The cooperative management of inter-organizational supply chains has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. To achieve business success, companies should not only focus on individual internal supply chains, but also on the coordination and collaboration of business processes and network-level decision-making along tiers of their supply chain networks (SCN)1 [12]. The cost savings realized by cooperation between the decision makers is significant in many cases. Since real-life supply chain management is closely related to problems caused by the divergent interests of the actors (enterprises) and the distributed structure of the underlying optimization (scheduling), one natural way to address this constellation is to employ a holonic multi-agent system (MAS), in which the process structure is mapped onto single agents [3]. In this paper we address the question of how production and logistics costs may be reduced by exploiting the scheduling flexibilities of the supply chain partners and employ an integrated approach to coordinate and optimize business processes by synchronizing the interacting production and logistics scheduling across the multi-tier supply web. For the producer and the distributor represented by single agents, various cost and schedule optimization problems are defined.