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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 noncentralized approaches for designing, configuring, and deploying complex systems. More than in other disciplines, there is a paradigm shift in logistics from hierarchical systems to heterachical systems, especially concerning the design and control of compound systems. In order to explore and establish a base for using and exploring the capabilities of distributed decision making, fundamental research must be executed. In the Collaborative Research Centre 637 ‘‘Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes—A Paradigm Shift and its Limitations’’, funded by the German Research Foundation, an interdisciplinary group of scientists investigates the prospects and limitation of the interactive decision making among several components of a logistic system. The components of a hierarchically organized logistic system are externally controlled units, which have only limited decision rights. On the other hand, in heterarchical systems, the components constituting a compound system are autonomous units, which interact with each other on their own responsibility, and they are provided with local intelligence and emancipated decision authority. Heterarchical structures grant autonomy to the single system components in order to enable decentralized decision making. Autonomy of components presupposes that interactive units in non-deterministic systems are able to decide and act on their own authority. Autonomous units representing components of a complex logistic system can be found on different levels of appearance and in several contexts. At the lowest level, there are agents representing autonomous physical logistic units like parcels or containers, which are capable and allowed to decide on their handling. At the medium level, there are autonomous planning agents like human schedulers or software agents being responsible for the decisions in a delimited problem area and cooperating with agents responsible for adjacent areas. Finally, at the upper level, there are autonomous organizational units, e.g., profit centers of an enterprise or partners in a collaborative system constituting a coalition following at least one common goal. In practice, most complex logistics systems are built in a hierarchical manner. Currently, there is a tendency to redesign such systems in a heterarchical way by constituting a set of interrelated, partly autonomous, components for the construction of the total system. The objective of the redesign is to achieve a higher degree of robustness and a positive emergence of the total system [1] by increasing H. Kopfer (&) J. Schonberger Lehrstuhl fur Logistik, FB 7, Universitat Bremen, Wilhelm-Herbst-Strase 5, 28359 Bremen, Germany e-mail: kopfer@uni-bremen.de

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