A Fuzzy Intelligent Agents based approach for modeling agility in integrated supply chains
The ability to build agile supply chains has not developed as rapidly as anticipated, because the development of technology to manage agile integrated supply chains is still under way. Also, due to ill-defined and vague indicators, which exist within agility assessment, many measures are described subjectively by linguistic terms, which are characterized by vagueness and multi-possibility, and the conventional assessment approaches cannot suitably nor effectively handle such dynamic situations. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to model agility and introduce Dynamic Agility Index (DALi) through fuzzy intelligent agents. Generally, it is difficult to emulate human decision making if the recommendations of the agents are provided as crisp, numerical values. The multiple intelligent agents used in this study communicate their recommendation as fuzzy numbers to accommodate ambiguity in the opinion and the data used for modeling agility attributes for integrated supply chains. Moreover, when agents operate based on different criteria pertaining to agility like flexibility, profitability, quality, innovativeness, pro-activity, speed of response, cost, robustness etc for integrated supply chains, the ranking and aggregation of these fuzzy opinions to arrive at a consensus is complex. The proposed fuzzy intelligent agents approach provides a unique and unprecedented attempt to determine consensus in these fuzzy opinions and effectively model dynamic agility.
Hello authors,
thankyou for your excellent paper.
Do you think that a similar approach, to that which you propose for the assessment of the supply chain agility, could be applied to the measurement of the agility drivers ?
It could be seen that the agility output level is monitored as quite high due to the fact there are lesser demands on the supply chain, so a more complete picture could then be seen?
Rich.