BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

Information coordination is a key approach to achieve supply chain coordination. Information types, their impact on supply chain performance, and the policy of information sharing are significant content in the research of supply chain coordination.

To implement operational information coordination in supply chain, defining the effect of operational information is where the shoe pinches. Combining qualitative analysis and quantitative research is very useful to do this. With the development of artificial intelligence, agent-based modeling method becomes a noticeable way in the research of supply chain coordination. Multi-agent computational environments are suitable for studying classes of coordination issues involving multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous optimizing agents where knowledge is distributed and agents communicate through messages. Since supply chain management is fundamentally concerned with coherence among multiple decision makers, a multi-agent modeling framework based on exp licit communication between constituent agents (such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors) is a natural choice. For future research, we will use this method to modeling information coordination in the supply chain.