A Multi Agent-based Service Framework for Supply Chain Management

Supply chain coordination has emerged as one of the major areas for companies to gain a competitive edge in a globalized world. Business organizations are increasingly located at the intersection of multiple supply chain networks. Managing such networks is hugely dependent on automation through combining advanced technologies such as software agent technologies, service oriented technologies, Internet of Things etc. This paper presents a multi agent and web service framework for Collaborative Material Procurement System (CMPS) in a supply chain. The information used in CMPS is used in two forms: business service rules and service description cases. It utilizes this hybrid information in order to form appropriate service, by using rule-based reasoning (RBR) and case-based reasoning (CBR). This paper outlines the CMPS architecture, designed to automatically retrieve software- based services for the agents that coordinate the supply chain form a service repository using a semantics-driven service similarity assessment algorithm.