Distributed Intelligent Agents for Logistics (DIAL)

The Distributed Intelligent Agents for Logistics (DIAL) is an open systems architecture that allows existing models to interface and communicate in a distributed network environment. The design is based on a multi-agent framework where a customer's problem can be decomposed and assigned to one or more (as needed) intelligent agents which together generate a logistics plan. An agent is a piece of software code that acts upon receiving information from a source (a model) and reasons using its internal knowledge. Many existing models simulate the different logistics operations; however, the models do not interact with each other and are not affected by each other's results. Therefore, it is difficult to model and analyze the logistics process as a whole. One solution is for the models to act as nodes in a network that simulates the entire logistics process. A group of agents, or a multi-agent system, is best suited to solve such real world problems, with each agent representing a node of the graph. This paper describes a distributed intelligent agent architecture for logistics.