Autonomous Order Monitoring by Software Agents

In B2B (business-to-business) e-commerce companies depend eminently on the punctual fulfillment of orders given to their suppliers. It is a very time consuming and costly task to observe every order in a way that bad events can be detected instantaneously. This is especially true if there are many suppliers providing various parts and you also have to check the supply of the suppliers etc. So called supply chain event management tries to cope with this problem. Software agents that gather event- related information are one promising approach to monitor a large number of different orders autonomously and individually. Fuzzy logic provides mechanisms for heuristic human-like assessments of these data. An agent-based concept is introduced that includes autonomous software for tracking orders on the one hand and fuzzy logic mechanisms for analyzing order data on the other hand. A prototype implementation illustrates this concept. Results of evaluation experiments using this prototype system are presented.