Coordinating multiple agents in the supply chain

The agent view provides a level of abstraction at which we envisage computational systems carrying out cooperative work by interoperating across net worked people, organizations and machines. A major challenge in building such systems is coordinating the behavior of the individual agents to achieve the individual and shared goals of the participants. We propose a conceptualization of the coordination task around the notion of structured "conversation" amongst agents. Based on this notion we build a complete multiagent programming language and system for explicitly representing, applying and capturing coordination knowledge. The language provides KQML-based communication, an agent definition and execution environment, support for describing interactions as multiple structured conversations among agents and rule-based approaches to conversation selection, conversation execution and event handling. The major application of the system is the construction and integration of multiagent supply chain systems for manufacturing enterprises. This application is used throughout the paper to illustrate the introduced concepts and language constructs.