An architecture for conflict management between make and delivery agents in an enterprise supply chain

Problems related to conflict management resolution between Make and Delivery activities within a Supply Chain are studied here. The traditional approach, which usually manages the problem via a lobal optimization system, seems not suitable due to the fact that Make and Delivery may belong to different enterprises. Furthermore, the prevalence of dynamic scheduling concepts is preferred to the rigidity of a well-fixed optimized plan. Every agent within this process has a traditional production/delivery plan, but communication is performed in terms of a generic common plan that states the dates of reception/delivery. The software architecture we propose uses a distributed and fully decentralized agent model; the customization of such a system has been accomplished by adding a congruent number of business processes, which manage plan synchronization problems, using interchangeable strategies. A dedicated agent that retrieves all the information useful to infer statistical evaluations has been included to gain feedback on system performance.