Multi-Agent coordination based on tokens: reduction of the bullwhip effect in a forest supply chain
AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
Newsvendor Bounds and Heuristic for Optimal Policies in Serial Supply Chains
Management Science
Competition, Cooperation, and Information Sharing in a Two-Echelon Assembly System
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Inventory Policies in a Decentralized Assembly System
Operations Research
Inventory control in a decentralised two-stage make-to-stock queueing system
International Journal of Systems Science - Production Coordination and Inventory Policies
Competition and Cooperation in a Two-Stage Supply Chain with Demand Forecasts
Operations Research
Managing a Noncooperative Supply Chain with Limited Capacity
Operations Research
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The decentralized supply chain management scheme of Lee and Whang (1999) can be viewed as operationalizing the decentralized management scheme implicit in Clark and Scarf (1960). This paper proposes the use of what are called responsibility tokens (RTs) to further facilitate that operationalization. The proposal assumes that a management information system, presumably electronic, is established to monitor inventories and shipment quantities, and to carry out transfer payments between players. As in Lee and Whang(1999), the incentives of the system are aligned, so if each player is brilliantly self-serving, the system optimal solution will result. While the system administrator need not know how the system should be managed, the most upstream player must know how to manage the system optimally for the system optimal solution to be achieved. RTs endow the system with an attractive self-correcting property: An example illustrates that upstream players are given a mechanism and the incentive to correct for downstream overordering. The downstream players who over-order are penalized, but system performance is not degraded much. Extensions and further research are also discussed.