Role of intelligent agents in electronic supply chain management

Supply chain management is the management of material, information and money flows of an integrated and collaborative network that includes suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, distribution centers and retailers. Fast and flexible coordination of these flows among different companies ensures efficiency in the supply chain management.In an era of globalization, products and services are designed and delivered around specific customer requirements. Additionally, technological improvements create many core competences in supplying many products, which would be hard for a firm to cope with. This situation leads some services such as procurement, manufacturing, distribution and sales to be outsourced which increase uncertainty, complex and delicate business relationships that must be managed.To address this complexity and unstable customer demand, businesses explore new forms of organization and collaboration mechanisms to work together with their suppliers and customers. At this point, we face with multi-agent based systems which compose of intelligent agents with autonomy, learning, adaptability and proactive traits. These systems have different functions in the supply chain, such as coordination of information and material flows, providing necessary infrastructure for managers to make good decisions.