Supporting mass customization with agent-based coordination

Abstract

Mass customization (MC) often implies a value chain with several spatially distributed actors that require extensive coordination. Agent technology is beginning to be utilized in supply chain management because of its ability to facilitate collaboration and coordination. Thus, agents are suitable for constructing MC environments and interfacing the various participants working together to archive the common goal of producing customized goods. This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture for MC, which takes into account the coordination problems that exist in MC. Because of asymmetric and incomplete knowledge bases, agents may be limited in global planning and scheduling. Therefore, we suggest a three-tier model of coordination and utilize partial global plans for addressing the coordination problem. Finally, we provide an example application and a prototype implementation for the MC coordination.

The impact of mass customisation practices on performances: an exploratory study of Chinese manufacturers

“…An advanced information system is a pre-requisite to implement MC (Pine, 1993;Da Silveira et al, 2001). Information technology should be used to coordinate information flow in the existing systems (e.g., planning, inventory, logistics, and product design) to support MC (Sugumaran et al, 2006). These tools help the manufacturer integrate and coordinate information from different sources to support intra-organisational cooperation and collaboration.…”