Supply Chain Management using Soft Computing: A Review

Participating members in a manufacturing supply chain usually use an information system like enterprise resources planning (ERP) for planning and scheduling activities independently. Recent research indicates that there is a need to handle such distributed activities in an integrated manner, especially under uncertain and fast changing environments. A multi agent system, a branch of distributed artificial intelligence, is a contemporary modeling technique for a distributed system in the manufacturing domain. This distributed modeling technique is suitable for integrating supply chain networks, which have distributed entities within the system. Each system makes decision locally, i.e., a local information system. By adopting a multi agent modeling technique, supply chain networks can be built efficiently based on an information system. This paper compile empirical findings on using soft computing technology applications insupply chain management to improve the supply chain efficiency.