ANTS in the Supply Chain

Computer agent based systems provide a natural mechanism to reflect real world human agent based systems. Supply chains are networks of corporations involving multiple human agents in connected but disparate processes. We investigate some ways that computer agent-based systems can assist and supplant human-based interaction and decision making in a supply chain without the need for unwieldy centralized or top-down management schemes. The Agent Network for Task Scheduling (ANTS) architecture uses techniques inspired by both human institutions and insect colonies. In ANTS large populations of simple agents exhibit robust behavior in scheduling supply chains. We describe a new mechanism called least commitment scheduling that defers decisions on process sequences until the last possible moment. A Densitybased Emergent Scheduling Kernel (DESK) uses probabilistic committed capacity profiles of resources over time to provide a surface over which the agents can wander looking for opportunities to optimize.