Pascal Forget

Study of the performance of multi-behaviour agents for supply chain planning

In todays industrial context, competitiveness is closely associated to supply chain performance. Coordination between business units is essential to increase this performance, in order to produce and deliver products on time to customers, at a competitive price. While planning systems usually follow a single straightforward production planning process, this paper proposes that partners adapt together their local planning process (i.e. planning behaviours) to the different situations met in the supply chain environment. Because each partner can choose different behaviour and all behaviours will have an impact on the overall performance, it is difficult to know which is preferable for each partner to increase their performance. Using agent-based technology, simulation experiments have been undertaken to verify if multi-behaviour planning agents who can change planning behaviours to adapt to their environment can increase supply chain performance. These agents have been implemented in an agent-based planning platform, using a case study illustrating a lumber supply chain. The performance analysis shows that advanced planning systems can take advantage of using multiple planning processes, because of the dynamic context of supply chains.

Public road transport efficiency: a literature review via the classification scheme

The paper provides a literature review of public road transport efficiency. We classified 24 articles published between 2000 and 2011, based on journals, date of publication, the nature of the papers’, the context of the study, the adopted approach by which efficiency is measured, the adopted outputs and inputs and empirical findings. Results are presented, discussed and future directions are generated. The classification scheme technique shows that the application of the mixed approach of Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis (DEA-SFA), with operators of different nationalities, is more robust for analysis of public transport efficiency, and for identifying sources inefficiency. Financial variables are important inputs and outputs for efficiency studies. However, although the frontier literature has substantially contributed to the knowledge of public transport technologies and the determinants of performance, it has been found that many important issues remain unresolved.

Efficiency evaluation in public road transport: a stochastic frontier analysis

AbstractThis paper measures the technical efficiency of 54 public road transport operators and investigates the degree to which various factors influence efficiency levels in these firms. The study makes an attempt to provide an overview of the general status of different operators in 18 countries. Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) methods are applied to our sample over a twelve year period from 2000 to 2011. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive analysis of technical efficiency of public road transport operators in 18 countries using parametric method. Our empirical results indicate that investment, operating profit and firm size have a significant influence on technical efficiency levels. We find that technical efficiency level of public road transport operators varies between 0.458 and 0.95. We also observe that large-size operators with more investment capacity tend to be more technically efficient than small-size operators. Finally, we find that operators from developed countries are tec...

Design of Multi-Behavior Agents for Supply Chain Planning: An Application to the Lumber Industry

New economic challenges and recent trends regarding globalization have forced companies of many industries, including the Canadian lumber industry, to question aspects of their organizations. Many of them have looked to reengineer their organizational processes and business practices and adopt supply chain management best practices. An aspect studied by many researchers recently is supply chain sales and operations planning, which deals with the management of client orders through the supply chain. Each partner involved must decide quantities and production dates, and allocate resources for each product needed, with respect to production capacities and transportation delays. Coordination between production partners is essential in such a context in order to deliver products on time to final clients. As perturbations occur all the time in such complex system, production centers have to react quickly to correct deviances and create new plans, while coordinating changes with partners. At the structural level, centralized approaches handle supply chain planning and coordination with difficulty, mainly because of the complexity of such problems and the challenges of sharing private information between partners. Decentralized approaches are now being considered to overcome these problems, giving different partners the responsibility to locally plan their production, using coordination schemes to insure coherent supply chain behavior. Agent-based technology provides a natural approach to model supply chain networks and describe specialized planning agents. On the other hand, decentralized approaches are generally sub-optimal. Heuristics are used by agents to coordinate and optimize their production plan in order to reach feasible global solutions. Because a local change in a plan can impact other partners, a coordination mechanism must be used to insure that every partner is informed of the change and can make their own changes if necessary. Most of the time, system designers or production planners select a planning heuristic at design time, choosing what they believe to be the best decision for their specific application. The main problem is that the heuristic may not be adapted to further perturbations or environmental conditions the planning agents will face in a production context. Usually, these local algorithms used by agents can be parameterized on several levels (such as

Collaborative Event Management in Supply Chains: An Agent-Based Approach

The development of integrated supply chains and the use of inter-organizational information systems have increased business interdependencies. Thus, the ability to deal quickly and seamlessly with everyday unplanned events is critical to maintain the overall performance of the supply chain. In order to develop tools to promote the collaborative management of such events, agent-based technology takes advantage of agents’ ability to make autonomous decisions in a distributed context. Collaborative Event Management (CEM) is an approach designed to improve agility in a context where planning decisions are supported by a distributed advanced planning system (d-APS). This paper proposes an agent model geared with tools to collaboratively plan operations to deal with unplanned events.

Coordination mechanism design in supply chains using multi-behaviour agents

In todays industrial context, competitiveness is closely associated with supply chain performance. The ongoing development of integrated supply chains has increased the importance of supply chain management. This paper focuses on the design of coordination mechanisms that determine how partners interact to coordinate their production planning. We present a simulation tool to aid in the design of coordination mechanisms using multi-behaviour agents in an agent-based planning system where agents act as partners. The implementation of this solution is realised through the FORAC agent-based planning platform, which is dedicated to supply chain production planning and simulation for the lumber industry.