Applying Electronic Supply Chain Management Using Multi-Agent System: A Managerial Perspective

In the electronic business environment, supply chain management must deal with globalization, proliferating productvariety, organizational barriers, and quick information sharing. Consequently, appropriate tools are needed to support supply chainmanagement. We believe that software agents are good candidates to overcome these challenges. In this paper, I propose MAS+SCM, which is a Multi-Agent System (MAS) to support Electronic Supply Chain Management (E-SCM). The proposed model consists of aset of agents that are working together to maintain supplying, manufacturing, inventory and distributing. The main operations of thesoftware agents include: (1) receiving information from customer orders (2) check the inventory (3) make the production schedule (4) issue the order of raw materials from the suppliers (5) receive the raw materials (6) production (7) deliver products to the customer. In addition to the interface agents and communication protocols among agents