Scheduling Sustainable Supply Chains Based on Multi-agent Systems and Workflow Models

Global competition, ever shorter product life cycles and pressure from environmental protection are forcing companies to explore more agile and sustainable supply chain practices. Motivated by these needs, this paper aims to study how to achieve agility in sustainable supply chains by exploiting the state of the art information technologies. Our goal is to develop architecture and propose a solution methodology to endow the actors with the ability to configure sustainable supply chain network quickly, flexibly and cost effectively. Managing workflows in sustainable supply chains is a challenging issue due to the computational complexity involved, distributed architecture and dependency among different partners' workflows. To respond to these challenges, we propose a framework to achieve coherent and consistent workflows that can meet order requirements based on multi-agent systems (MAS). To achieve sustainability and reduce the cost and time involved in software development, we propose an approach that combines contract net protocol, workflow models and optimization theory. We implement a prototype system based on industrial standards, including FIPA and the Petri net workflow specification model. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by an application scenario.