Autonomy and decentralized decision making in logistics: new ideas, technological innovations, enhanced decision support, and initial applications

Excerpt

The last decade has revealed a profound paradigm change with respect to the organization and control of logistic systems. Forced by recent trends in the organization of enterprises and new market requirements, logistic systems are confronted with new prospects and challenges that do not fit with the paradigm of central planning. The involvement of several decision making units in one supply chain, the management of real-time data, the division of work and decision making, and a high market dynamic require innovative decision support and business information concepts. Additionally, wide-area-computer networks, ubiquitous computing, and 24-h-data availability provide a data basis as well as an infrastructure for a joint decision making among autonomous entities (e.g. agents). While the paradigm of a monolithic central control of all activities has been in the focus of research and application for several decades, the last years have revealed the intrusion of non-centralized approaches for designing, configuring, and deploying complex systems. …