Research of Information Framework for Fourth Party Logistics

The Fourth Party Logistics (4PL) information system used today is comprised of disconnected legacy system, and lacks the support for interoperability for whole supply chain integration. This situation often prevents the 4PL provider from fully exploring market opportunities in a timely fashion. To address this problem, we propose an agent-based framework for intelligent 4PL integration. A set of agents with core capabilities can be quickly assembled to help with the gathering of relevant information and knowledge, to cooperate with each other and with other legacy systems and human managers and analysts to arrive at timely decisions in dealing with various logistics scenarios. The proposed multi-agent system (MAS), including its theoretical foundation, architecture, and implementation are presented. In the end, we point out the cloud computing and Internet of things will be the research direction of 4PL information framework in the future and the next-generation broadband wireless mobile communications network will bring out the new generation of 4PLIF solution with mobile MAS.