Investigating Impact of Intelligent Agents in Improving Supply Chain Performance

Improvement in supply chain performance is one of the major issues in the current world. Lack of coordination in the supply chain is the main drawback of supply chain that many researchers have proposed different methodologies to overcome it. VMI (Vendor-managed inventory) is one of these methodologies that implementing it has some obstacles. This paper proposes new model that is agent-managed SC. This paper is trying to use intelligent agent technology in the supply chain. In this paper supply chain assessment performance measure indicators have been divided into three categories; cost, flexibility andcustomer responsiveness indicators. In the first category we use holding and backordered inventory costs, for second category, bullwhip effect are used and for the last one customer responsiveness indicator has been applied. Bullwhip effect is one of the main phenomena’s that has been tried to reduce it with the agent-based systems. Method of this research is discrete event simulation. In this paper, three echelon supply chain performances, without intelligent agents, have been studied and performance indicators have been measured, after that, we introduce agent-based supply chain and in the new model, performance indicators have been measured and compared with the basic model. This paper demonstrates the performance of intelligent agents in the improvement of supply chain performance indicators.

Keywords:

Supply chain , Coordination , VMI , Agent-managed SC , Simulation , Performance indicators