A Multi-Agent Framework for Supporting Intelligent Fourth-Party Logistics

• Main Authors: LAU, Hoong Chuin, LO, G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2001
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Business; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1118; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2117/viewcontent/Multi_AgentFramework.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

A distributed intelligent agent-based framework that supports fourth-party logistics optimization under a web-based e-Commerce environment has been proposed in this paper. In the framework, customer job requests come through an e-Procurement service. These requests are consolidated and pushed to the e-Market Place service periodically. The e-Market Place then serves as a broker that allows intelligent agents to bid to serve these requests optimally in real-time by solving multiple instances of underlying logistics optimization problem. The resulting system was implemented based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform using distributed system technology for communication between objects.