A Framework for distributed knowledge management in autonomous logistic processes

The trends and recent changes in logistics lead to complex and partially conflicting requirements on logistic planning and control systems. Due to the lack of efficiency of currently available strategies and methodologies, a new paradigm for logistics planning and control is required. An emerging approach is the analysis and design of autonomous logistic processes. Agents represent a modern approach for implementing autonomous systems. The challenge for the design of agent systems is to integrate the complex and dynamic knowledge required for reliable decision-making in logistics. To address this problem, we introduce a framework for distributed knowledge management in competitive environments. Our approach combines a general role model enabling distributed, flexible agent-based knowledge management services and a set of general decision parameters for rational agents.