An Autonomous Decentralized Supply Chain Planning and Scheduling System

For manufacturing industries, the integration of business processes from customer-order management to delivery 珙Supply Chain Management珩 has widely been received much attention from the viewpoints of agile and lean manufacturing. Supply chain planning concerns broad activities ranging network-wide inventory management, forecasting, transportation, distribution planning, production planning and scheduling, and so on (Jeremy, 2001; Simon et al., 2000). Various supply chain models and solution approaches have been extensively studied in previous literature (Vidal & Goetschalckx, 1997). These models are often divided into the following three categories: