Marketing

Paper No. 483

Automating Supply-Chain Management
Michael N. Huhns
University of South Carolina Center for Information Technology Columbia, SC 29208 USA +1-803-777-5921

Larry M. Stephens
University of South Carolina Center for Information Technology Columbia, SC 29208 USA +1-803-777-2895

Nenad Ivezic
Nat’l. Inst. of Standards & Technology Manufacturing System Integration Div. Gaithersburg, MD 20899 USA +1-301-975-3536

huhns@sc.edu ABSTRACT

stephens@sc.edu

nivezic@nist.gov

This paper explores a linguistic approach to coordination modeling as a formal basis for supply-chain management (SCM) in manufacturing. The approach promotes the interchange of standard documents: enterprises need only describe their supply processes using OAG business object documents and UML interaction diagrams. Our methodology and tools analyze the documents and interactions in terms of four linguistic primitives and convert the diagrams into specifications and implementations of software agents. The agents then cooperate in automating the resultant supply chain. We evaluate our methodology in the context of several industrial scenarios. We conclude that supplychain automation using software-agent technology is feasible.

collaborations, alliances, and long-term relationships, which are the more significant drivers of improved efficiency in supply chains. A distributed architecture is thus preferable, but computer applications that can automate supply chains require a number of important properties beyond traditional software approaches. • Disintermediation (the direct association between users and their software). Providing a participant with seamless access to and interaction with remote information, application, and human resources requires a distributed, active-object architecture. Dynamic composability and execution. A system should execute as a set of distributed parts, but the resources required will be mostly unknown until run-time: this requires an... [continues]

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