Coordination of order and production policy in buyer–vendor chain using PROSA Holonic architecture

Abstract

Supply chain (SC) coordination can be pursued by adopting a centralized or decentralized decision-making approach. In recent years, new software architecture for managing the supply chain at the tactical and operational levels has emerged. It views the supply chain as a set of intelligent software agents, each responsible to perform one or more activities in the supply chain while interacting and negotiating with other agents in the planning and execution of these responsibilities. This paper describes a practical system framework for coordination activities in a buyer–vendor chain to determine the best decision making in the chain using the holonic paradigm. In the present article, while reference is made to the holonic paradigm, its related concepts as well as the implementation aspects of the mentioned paradigm within a supply chain are discussed. Throughout the article, as we try to cast light on the Product-Resource-Order-Staff Architecture of this approach, attention is paid to the operational advancements of the model in order for the model to be responsive to the needs of coordination of product and information flows within a buyer–vendor chain under present stochastic environments. The proposed holonic model in this article makes use of intelligent agents and mathematical models to build decision-making models in the proposed holons, as well as solution algorithms, negotiation mechanisms, and coordination-expanded policies in the mentioned architecture. Numerical studies are also provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and methods.