Flexible Workflow Management in Agile Supply Chain System

With the vehement development of global competition , Agile Supply Chain (ASC) becomes an effective approach that supports dynamic ent erprise alliance and realizes agile manufacturing, as for the enterprises to cap ture market opportunities rapidly and strengthen their anti-risk ability. As Ag ile Supply Chain System (ASCS) is dynamic and distributed, the realization of it ’s processes needs to be much flexible. Often in Agile Supply Chain System (ASCS ), there are many dynamic tasks, many changes of the processes, and cooperative workflows, which need the workflows able to be adjusted agilely and smoothly, no t much affecting others. This paper will propose a flexible workflow management for achieving the agility and compatibility. At the first of the paper, we will discuss the situation in which Agile Supply C hain System is applied, and then we will elaborate the characteristics of Agile Supply Chain System. So with that, the shortcomings of the process managements t hat are, at present, used in Supply Chain Systems will be displayed clearly. The n, the proposal will be given in the paper, to resolve the problems in the prese nt process management in ASCS. We will see supply chain systems implemented mult i-agent-based technology to adapt to the dynamic environment, however in many systems, coordination of the workflows is executed by the explicit messages comm unicated between the agents. This will lead to a tightly coupled system. To over come it, the paper suggests the workflow management in agent-based ASCS using t he Events-Triggering mechanism, instead of the explicit messages. We create Eve nts-Triggering contents and rules, having push-pull mechanism, event-state se t and triggering-conditions, and store them in the distributed database subject ed to the corresponding agents. Adjusting the Events-Triggering data will be us ed to adapt to the dynamic tasks and the changes of processes. In sum, we will p resent the methods of process modeling, the system structure, and the executing -mechanism of the flexible workflow management we propose in the paper. Also, t he paper outlines several exception-handling policies for the flexible workflow management, in succession. And at the final of the paper, we discuss the realiz ation of the flexible workflow management in Agile Supply Chain System. The flex ible workflow management will be implemented using CORBA services and Java techn ology for the distributed systems. CORBA is chosen as the specification of distr ibuted electronic data exchange, and Java as the construction tool of the system . The framework of the flexible workflow management constructed on them is showe d in the paper.

Efficient Mechanisms for Task Allocation in Agile Supply Chain Management

An agile supply chain can be defined as a dynamic s up ply network of some autonomous or semi-autonomous business entities, which can well adapt to the competitive, cooperative and dynamic market environment Agile supply chain needs quick response ability to the unpredictable and ever-changin g market environment, and the entities in agile supply chain have complex relati onships of competition, cooperation and dynamics, which make agile supply chain management a very complex process that includes a lot of no-linear, dynamic and uncertain factors. There is a common opinion that applying multi-agent collaborative work environm ent is an appropriate method to solve agile supply chain management problem. We have presented a model based on coordination of Multi-Agent System (MAS) two ye ars ago, and it has already been proved to be a rather better model by practical project. In the model, we apply MAS structure, and agents negotiate each other to achieve coordination, so the communication among agents becomes very impo rtant. Task allocation is a very common problem in agile supply chain management, and t here are many complex task re-allocation problems at the transaction level. In such situations, agents need to negotiate with others to produce effective alloc ation results. But traditional negotiation mechanisms often cease to work as a r esult of communication or computational complexities. Auctions provide an effici ent way of resolving one-to-many negotiations, so in this paper, we choose Eng lish auction to design a sufficient negotiation mechanism, and use combinatorial auction to solve the complex task re-allocation problems. We first analyze the features of task allocation problems in agile supply chain and build a problem model, and then design a comprehensive task allocation mechanism based on auctio n theories. Finally, by examining our results for what it is, essentially, an ap plication of game-theory and mechanism design to existing application, we draw some general conclusions on how such concepts can be operationalized in automate d agents. Some further research on the problem is also discussed.