A Multi Agent Approach to Allocate Orders to Distribution Centres in a highly dynamic environment

Nowadays, competition takes place in an environment characterized by high market shifting, rapid new technology development and introduction, global competition and customers who need focalization. Therefore, supply chain networks are becoming more dynamic and turbulent than ever before. The Distribution Centre (DC) is an important node in a supply chain network in maintaining the flow of goods and materials among manufacturers and customers. The capability of the DC to maintain the same level of performance in a highly dynamic scenario allows improvement of the competitiveness of the supply chain network. The focus of this chapter is on the allocation of customers to the DCs in very dynamic environments. A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is designed, in order to implement an architecture that is capable of rapid response to changing market conditions. A negotiation approach is proposed for coordinating the involved agents in the architecture: customers and distribution centres. The implementation of the MAS architecture was developed using the JAVA development kit; this platform was used to perform a discrete event simulation and test the proposed approach. Several scenarios are investigated, in scenarios ranging from static to highly dynamic market conditions. The simulation results highlight that the cooperation approach allows obtaining significant growth of performance in several different types of environment