A Review on the Role of Intelligent Software Agents in Supply Chain Management

In the current competitive market, productive and economical firms need to manage and monitor resources and elements related to outside the organization, in addition to considering the organization and its internal resources. So today, supply chain management is proposed as one of the fundamental infrastructures for implementing e-commerce worldwide. Supply chain management is a phenomenon that provides a way so that the customers can receive trustable services and high quality products with minimum cost. Today the attitude of managers toward supply chain has changed and the usage of information technology in this field is increasing. On the other hand, the promotion of business intelligence is one of the most effective achievements of information technology. Hence, the usage of intelligent software agents in supply chain management can improve the management in this field. In this paper, in addition to presenting some general information in supply chain management and intelligent software agents, we will review some practical aspects of agents in supply chain management and we will discuss some aspects of the usage of agents like agent based negotiation model.