Integrated Autonomy A Modeling-Based Investigation of Agrifood Supply Chain Performance

Abstract

The success of supply chains, whether they are whole-of-industry chains or internal business chains, depends on integration, coordination, communication and cooperation. However, one of the key issues faced by enterprises within a supply chain is the tendency for each component in the supply chain to have different goals – particularly since each component is very often an autonomous business unit. This situation can, and very often does, result in a lack of integration, coordination, communication and thus cooperation.This paper describes the use of agent based modeling techniques to investigate whether the distributed computing concept of Integrated Autonomy could also be promoted as a business strategy for managing agri-food supply chains in order to increase efficiencies and coordination across the chain. The results of modeling two different supply chain scenarios in both an industry and in an enterprise environment indicate that IA as a concept can be translated into a practical management strategy with associated performance metrics aimed at increasing efficiencies, coordination and communication across supply chains.