Oil Industry Supply Chain Management as a Holonic Agent Based Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem

Very few industries can benefit more from maximizing supply chain efficiencies than the oil and gas companies. However, the behavior of such supply chains is too complex to be modeled analytically. Multi-agent systems show great similarity with respect to supply chains and provide the flexibility to model the complexities and dynamics of real world supply chains without excessive simplifying assumptions. Since supply chain management problem has a recursive structure, it becomes appropriate to employ holonic agents for its modeling. In addition, the type of relationships between its entities and the required global optimization make it natural to model its interactions as constraints, and the entire system as a Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP).