Pan-supplier stock control in a virtual warehouse

We describe the commercial application of agents to the handling of catalogue and stock-control for the selling of books on the internet. The primary characteristic of the target market is (very) low volumes over a (very) large number of items, thus agility and extremely low overheads are the essential factors for a viable business model. Being a new company (established 2004), without legacy software and with the freedom to make new choices, it was decided that the agent abstraction offered both short-term software engineering and longer-term business advantages. This expectation has been borne out in practice, in that it has been possible to construct an e-trading platform, using a 4-person team over a period of a few months, and that is now part of a live business operation handling just over 12,000 transactions daily. In this paper we explain how agents helped focus attention on the responsibilities of key software functions, how different functions should interact with one another and how to identify and propagate key performance indicator information through the system to detect unexpected behaviour. Agent technology has many potential benefits for dynamic fast-moving businesses where software requirements change quickly and business needs grow rapidly, all within a dynamic environment that has entirely different rules across the axes of geography, market, customer and competitor. Using autonomous agents allowed The Book Depository to build quickly a complex network of P2P relationships with a large number of suppliers and publishers of very different sizes who each utilize a variety of different trading and data interchange standards.