Analysis of Mobile Agents considering the Fan Out - Mobile Agents for Autonomous Logistics

Abstract

The current trends and recent changes in logistics lead to new, complex and partially conflicting requirements for logistic planning and control systems. Due to the distributed nature of logistics the usage of agent technology is promising. Due to the mobile nature of logistics the usage of mobile agent technology is promising as well. Scenarios of usage of mobile agents in logistics are presented, a notation for those scenarios is defined and it is shown analytically in which cases the usage of mobile agent is superior to conventional communication. The main variable under study is the fan out, which is the number of partners a mobile agent needs to communicate with