Production-outsourcing supply chain quality management based on multi-agent system

Quality is one of the most important factors for an enterprise to win the competition. Production-outsourcing supply chain (POSC) is a kind of special supply chain in which the core enterprise transfer the manufacturing of products to the other enterprises. It results in the separation of two important stages - product designing and product manufacturing for forming product quality, that is product design and product manufacture are completed by different enterprises respectively. Traditional quality management which focuses on the inside of enterprise and emphasizes the coordination and cooperation of processes, elements and department inside an enterprise cannot satisfy the requirements of this kind of POSC quality management. In this paper, the architecture of a distributed cooperative quality management based on multi-agent system is presented. And an incentive mechanism is put forward to achieve the distributed cooperative quality management for this kind of POSC based on the information sharing through this architecture.