Book Description

"A supply chain is a linked series of various business partners that participate in the process of developing a finished product from raw materials. Supply chain management is the process of managing all the related activities. Though decisions are made by each business partner on their own, frequent interaction with other partners is a must. Timely response and high accuracy in the decision made require collection of related data, analysis, and conclusion steps without missing a beat. However, these steps are tedious, complex, and very error prone as often these decisions are made by people with multiple responsibilities and frequent interruptions under the pressure to make timely decisions. The communication among the business partners also is very cumbersome and complex due to various application standards and hardware platforms used. Recent development sin information technology such as web services based applications have considerably improved communication among interacting partners in a supply chain. Web services provide a simple interoperable messaging framework in which data can be exchanged amongst different trading partners irrespective of their applications and platform. This work has successfully illustrated the process of automating some decision making processes in a supply chain by developing a representative supply chain (retailer, manufacturer, supplier and carrier) scenario using software agent technology and web services. Software agent (software module) is a decision making system which senses and acts in some environment. Autonomous software agents are agents which take decisions without any human intervention. They have properties of autonomy, reactivity, proactiveness and sociability. Software agent reduces human intervention and errors. The agents are based on a modified MASCOT agent architecture. These agents are implemented using web services and are used to automate routine business processes such as price negotiation, request for quote, earliest delivery date determination, purchase order cancellation etc. Open applications Integration Specification (OAGIS) based standard Business Object Documents are used for communication amongst agents"--Abstract.