An Agent-Based Approach for Manufacturing Enterprise Integration and Supply Chain Management

Improving supply chain management is very important for increasing competitive position and profitability. Manufacturing enterprises are now moving towards open architectures for integrating their activities with those of their suppliers, customers and partners within wide supply chain networks. This paper presents an agent-based approach for manufacturing enterprise integration and supply chain management to meet such requirements. A hybrid agent-based architecture is proposed, the main features of such an architecture are then described, and a prototype implementation is presented.