Distribution-service network design: An agent-based approach

Abstract

Decisions to locate facilities within product-service network should satisfy all stakeholders' objective in supply chains. To provide solutions for such strategic decisions, many method and approaches have been applied including operations research, fuzzy decision making, etc. Reviewing the efficient and effective methods, agent-based models (ABM) are proved to provide competitive solutions to distributed problems. In this paper an agent-based model for the facility location problems is presented. Agents are defined as regional warehouses and cities; optimization rules are applied to the behavior of agents in distribution-service network environment. Agents make decision on the location of facilities based on autonomy factors and Optimization rules which are derived from similar optimization problems in facility location. Proposed model is implemented to a case in automobile after sales services network. Theefficiency of proposed model is evaluated by defined performance measures under demand uncertainty. It is concluded that embedding optimization behavior into autonomous agents can provide productive solutions for complex decision in uncertain environment.