An Intelligent Decision Support System for Supply Chain Integration

The integration of supply chain has become an important aspect in business environment due to the various business competitive pressures. This research proposes an intelligent decision support system for supply chain integration to support a supply chain’s competitive strategy of and help an organization gain a competitive advantage. Three major issues and related information technologies (IT), including a multi-agent architecture, data cube technique, and an ANN-based system, are investigated to explore the integration of supply chain activities. A multi-agent based architecture is proposed to support the selection and negotiation of purchasing bids and assist the decision making. The concept of data cube is used to investigate the multidimensional data of ordering information and evaluate the decision criteria of purchasing and ordering processes. A system combines supplier selection evaluation and artificial neural network (ANN) technique is designed to evaluate and forecast the supplier’s performance.