A software agent framework for the support of software project management
SAICSIT '03 Proceedings of the 2003 annual research conference of the South African institute of computer scientists and information technologists on Enablement through technology
On-demand e-supply chain integration: A multi-agent constraint-based approach
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
Online decision making and automatic decision model adaptation
Computers and Operations Research
An approach to event-driven algorithm for intelligent agents in multi-agent systems
KES-AMSTA'08 Proceedings of the 2nd KES International conference on Agent and multi-agent systems: technologies and applications
Multi-agent modeling and simulation for petroleum supply chain
ICIC'06 Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Intelligent computing: Part II
E-service/process composition through multi-agent constraint management
BPM'06 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Business Process Management
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When a supply chain is established supply chain management (SCM) needs supporting tools for the tasks of operative planning, scheduling, and coordination. These tasks have to be performed not only on the level of the enterprises involved but also within their established business entities (e.g. plants, areas, resource groups, resources) in which the high levelschedules have to be put into operation. Most approaches of SCM favor a hierarchical coordination of the supply chain together with powerful algorithmic solutions for the mainly predictive scheduling tasks. These approaches are lacking the incorporation of feedback from lower levels and possibilities of reactive scheduling. Thus flexibility and reactivity aremain issues to be improved.In this paper we will present an approach using teams of cooperating agents in a hierarchical as well as heterarchical way to overcome the problems mentioned. To simplify the generation of such a hierarchy of agents, we develop a framework for scheduling agents that contains the basic features of an agent e.g., event handling, data storage, communication, and possibilities for appending scheduling algorithms and specific cooperation mechanisms. The framework will be described and an example shall illustrate how it is used to build teams of cooperating agents on several levels of the scheduling hierarchy.