Download The Researches on Green Supply Chain Based On Multi-Agent

The Researches on Green Supply Chain Based On Multi-Agent
LU Qing, TANG Qi
School of Management,
Tanjin polytechnic University, P.R.Chain, 300384
Abstract: Because of the deterioration of the environment and the excess consumption of resources,
manufacturing industry have more and more pressures, many enterprises start to implement green
supply chain management. The strategic target of implement green supply chain is the environment
protection, so it needs to consider more factors and the difficulty of the communication among the
enterprises in the supply chain is increased. This article first study the communication of enterprises in
the supply chain, based on discussing the attributes of the intelligent agent, this article views the green
supply chain as composed of a set of intelligent agents, then realized interactions cross internet by web
services technology. This article established a green supply chain model based on multi-agent.
Key words: green supply chain, intelligent agent, web services, multi-agent system
1 Introduction
The supply chain has been traditionally defined as a one-way, integrated manufacturing process
wherein raw materials are converted into final products, then delivered to customers. Under this
definition, the supply chain includes only those activities associated with manufacturing, from raw
material acquisition to final product delivery. However, due to recent changing environmental
requirements affecting manufacturing operations, increasing attention is given to developing
environmental management strategies for the supply chain. The green supply chain passes through the
environmental awareness idea to the entire supply chain, take the environmental effect, the resources use
efficiency and the economic benefit synthesis most superior as the goal. The green supply chain
emphasis to the green operation and management of the product’s entire life cycle, and pursue to reduce
the cost of the supply chain when make the resources consumption and the environmental effect lowest.
Therefore the green supply chain is more systematic, integration and usability. Implement green supply
chain strategy in the enterprises is able to obtain more actual effects than implement green manufacture
in a single enterprise. Compared with the traditional supply chain, green supply chain is more complex,
it requests the supplier, the manufacturer, the retailer and the customer all pay attention to the
environmental protection and the resources use to promote the economical and the environment
coordinated development. Therefore, the model of green supply chain should be consultation,
auto-adapted, as well as the intelligence. Along with the network technology development, the use of
intelligent body with independent inference and decision as well the as the multi-intelligent the body
system to simulate, optimize, and control the operation the of the enterprise's supply chain already
became one of important methods which study and implement supply chain management. Intelligent
agent not only has unique superiority in consultation and auto-adapted, but also has good cooperation
mechanism and seal technology, it can fully unify the network development, and enable the superiority
of the green supply chain management based on Intelligent Agent model in network full display. This
paper use role modeling, give a brief introduction to the process of analysis, modeling and design.
2Intelligent Agent and multi-Agent system
There are many definitions of agent, this paper definite agent as a software entity with autonomy,
reactivity, reasoning, mobile and intelligent in the information world. These characteristics determine
agent can affect to the environment, can coordinate, cooperation and communication with other agents.
According to the definition, agent can be expressed as a triple of AgentID, Attribute and Behavior,
654
AgentID is the identifier of agent; Attribute is the attribute set, it mainly definite it’s capacity and a
series of objectives in the actual process, including the goal set (Goal) and state set (Status); Behavior is
the behavior or function operation set, including a series of activities, the response behavior and
independent behavior when carry out duties. The independent behavior is a kind of advance behaviors, it
triggered by some internal rules (environmental protection rules, resource use rules, etc.), the internal
rules stored in the agent’s knowledge library.
Multi-Agent system composes some independent intelligent agents with the purpose of complete
some tasks. Each agent has its own capability and role in the environment, any two agents can
communication in the system, but all of the agents in the system are independent. When receives a
request, each agent must help others when it has the ability, and each agent can enter and leave the
system freely. Multi-Agent system has the following features: 1) Each agent in the system only has
partial information, it should cooperation with others when solve problems. 2) The agent in the
multi-Agent system can interacting and learning to adapt the new environment when the environment
change and uncertainty. 3) The data in the system is decentralized processing and storage. 4)
Asynchronous operation. The characteristics of the multi-agent system above-mentioned precisely fit in
the enterprise supply chain management system’s characteristics in practical operation. Therefore using
multi-agent system simulate the operation of green chain is a feasible.
3 The model of green supply chain based on multi-agent system
The green supply chain includes several business enterprises, various resources, several business links,
and the massive information flows in the supply chain is comes from multi-sources. Apart from manage
the information of the common supply chain, it particular emphasis on the relationship of resource
consumption and environmental impact. Therefore, this paper studies how to use agent technology
acquire high-quality information in the network.
3.1 Analyze of the green supply chain model based on multi-agent system
The green supply chain is a closed-loop network; the core of this green supply chain is the
manufacture enterprise. The enterprises in this supply chain are regarded as sub-systems of the whole
system. Every sub-system includes several function agents, and every function agent has some duties.
The function agents just as follow:
Inventory agent: Provides online inquiry and information services, inventory optimization and balance,
statistics track and control cargos, packaging and integration the storage information.
Transport agent: Responsible for the assignment and planning of resources, meet the request of
resources between factories which assign by the productive planning agent, consider a large number of
transport resources and transportation routes, and give better transport plans.
Order agent: Obtain orders from the customer service agent or the marketing agent, according to
different orders and information of resource (such as: inventory, supply, transportation and available
funds, etc.), Initial development the plan of how to implement the orders, after consultation with agents
transmit to other agent, and tracking, adjusting, coordinating of the implementation of orders.
Marketing agent: Survey the market to observe the market demands, and feedback to the productive
planning agent in time.
Productive planning agent: According to the information of orders and resources, planning for
production, and rescheduling when occur unusual situation (such as the increase and decrease of orders,
accidents, etc.).
Assessment agent: Tracking the materials flows in the supply chain, evaluating and monitoring the
implementation of the green supply chain.
Customer service agent: Provide information inquiry, the status of orders implementation and general
orders by homepage, carrying on the customer management, track the product until the customer,
according to information provided by the customer, keep maintenance of the products and give
suggestions to the core enterprise for improvement.
655
Recovery agent: Distribution on the different node of the supply chain, responsible for recycling waste
products, especially after the product’s life cycle, thus forming a closed supply chain.
Each agent subsystem contains different function agents to achieve their respective functions. Every
agent subsystem has coordinate agent, this agent responsible for the coordination of agents in the agent
subsystem and the coordination, consultation, planning and controlling of the whole agent subsystem
with other subsystems. Each task in the green supply chain is executed dynamically by agents. The
operation of the supply chain can be seen as the interaction and cooperation of the human, machines and
organizations, these processes can be described as the autonomous agent operating activities, so the
green supply chain can be seen as the network of the independent intelligent agents.
3.2 Integration of Web service technology and multi-agent technology
Now the temporary alliance commerce supply chain is very popular the core enterprise in the
green supply chain may often face the problem of changing when select the suppliers, in order to reduce
the impact of this, the paper introduces the web service technology. Web service is network-based,
distributed modular component; it can be regard as an object deployed on the web, its core standard
including SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. SOAP is a lightweight agreement use for exchange information in
disperse and distribute environment which XML-based; WSDL is a language based on XML, it use for
describing web service and web service’s parameters, functions and return values, it was used to
describe object interface; UDDI is used for standard the web registration information, through registry
the web services in the UDDI, enable the requester find out the services they need quickly. Web services
breakthrough of the barriers in the traditional network, provide a simple and robust platform for
development of the distributed system. Integrating the web service and the agent technology enable the
agents in the network "plug and play", it also provides support for information sharing and collaboration
between the agents. So that we can build up a highly adaptive, interactive and scalability multi-agent
system (MAS), which is just meet the green supply chain modeling needs.
In the multi-agent system, each agent has XML document to describe its specific function and call
interface. When an agent joined in a particular multi-agent system, it must publish itself first, that is to
say it must register it’s describe document in the UDDI agent. When an agent need the service provide
whit other agents, it first search the registration organization, then send messages to the right agent.
After received the messages, the correspond agent running the services and transmission the results to
the request agent in the form of news. Just like figure 2:
，
：
Figure 2 Web Services of Multi-Agent Entity
3.3 The green supply chain framework based on Agent and Web service
Each enterprise in the green supply chain should pack the services it can provide and registrant to
the UDDI registration center. From the perspective of Web services, the enterprises in the model can be
simply classified as service provider and service requester, and they use UDDI Agent to complete the
inquiry, broadcast and bind of their services. UDDI Agent including enterprise UDDI Agent and
function UDDI Agent. The enterprise UDDI Agent represents for the whole enterprise and provides
services for the whole enterprise, and the UDDI Agent in the enterprise complete the inquiry, broadcast
and bind of the services internal, those services can’t be inquired and used by other enterprises. This
paper establishes the framework of green supply chain based on the multi-agent system is like figure 3:
656
RecoveryAgent
Assessment Agent
TransportAgent
Productive
planningAgent
Inventory Agent
OrderAgent
…
…
…
Figure 3: The framework of green supply chain based on the multi-agent system
The operation of the model is: When an agent received a request for service, this agent first
corresponding with the UDDI Agent of the enterprise, then the UDDI Agent automatically moving to the
registration center, and inquiring the UDDI service massages of the related enterprise. As the intelligent
agent can move, it can carry out the operation by itself; by SOAP it can interact conveniently with
UDDI, get explicit service automatically and feedback useful information, which accelerated the
information service between the enterprises in the supply chain; realized reuse of the agent’s function
and partially substitute for the UDDI’s function.
When performance the service requests, the enterprise's UDDI agent can mobile and retrieve the
service description of all the registered enterprises, The UDDI does not need to choose service trust of
the long-term cooperation partners, it can use bundled support, historical performance, service quality
classification, similarity and load balance to design; But the Web service register center should elect
services first, it usually consider with the price of the service and the green operation condition etc. to
obtain valuable Web services. After obtaining the service description, the service requester process and
use the service description, generate the SOAP formation request to call Web service, UDDI Agent can
describe the service agreement by replacement mechanism, so that enterprises can be more effectively
for Web calling. so that enterprises can be more effectively for Web service calling.
Conclusion
Analyses the green supply chain framework, the paper builds a green supply chain model based on
the multi-agent system, in order to solve the communication of the agents better, introduces the web
service technology. Unifies the agent technology and the web service, constructs a dynamic multi- agent
alliance mechanism by the web service, which makes the intelligent agent join in and withdraw the
system freely, and conforms to the requirement of the green supply chain modeling, accelerated the
information transmission in the supply chain, ease for the core enterprise controlling and grasping the
performance of the whole supply chain, improve the efficiency of the green supply chain.
References
[1]Xu Qi. PES Model of Green Supply Chain and its Multi-agent-based System[J]. Journal of DongHua
University.VOL.32,No.6 Dec.2006. 26-32 (in Chinese)
[2]Ibrahim Cingil.An Architecture for Supply Chain Integration and Automation on the Internet[J].Distributed and
Parallel Databases,2004,10:59-102
[3]N R Jennings, An agent-based approach for building complex software systems[J]. Communications of the
657
ACM,2001,44(4):35-41
[4]Wu Chun-hui, Gong Zheng-hu. A Study of Web Service and Agent Technology[J]. Microprocessors. No.4,Aug
2006,96-98 (in Chinese)
[5]Wangshu-wang, Zheng Ren, Liu Zhi-feng. Study of Green Supply Chain Based on Agent[J], Mechanical science
and technology. 2004, 23 (4): 379-381 (in Chinese)
The author can be contacted from e-mail : [email protected]
658