Flexible Decision Support in Dynamic Interorganizational Networks

Abstract

We present the design of a service oriented architecture which facilitates flexible managerial decision making in dynamic business networks. We have implemented and tested this architecture in the MinneTAC trading agent, which is designed to compete in the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (Collins et al., 2005). Our design enables managers to decompose decision behaviors into separate, configurable components, and allows dynamic construction of analysis and modeling tools from small, single-purpose 'evaluator' services. The result of our design is that the network can easily be configured to test a new theory and analyze the impact of various approaches to elements of the agent's decision processes, such as procurement, sales, production, and inventory management. Additionally we describe visualizers that allow managers to see and manipulate the configuration of the network, and to construct economic dashboards that can display the current and historical state of any node in the network.

Keywords: intelligent agents, decision support systems, business networks, human-agent interaction, service composition

JEL Classification: L15, O32, M