Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2507.19038

A Distributed Approach for Agile Supply Chain Decision-Making Based on Network Attributes

Mingjie Bi·Dawn M. Tilbury·Siqian Shen·Kira Barton
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

In recent years, the frequent occurrence of disruptions has had a negative impact on global supply chains. To stay competitive, enterprises strive to remain agile through the implementation of efficient and effective decision-making strategies in reaction to disruptions. A significant effort has been made to develop these agile disruption mitigation approaches, leveraging both centralized and distributed decision-making strategies. Though trade-offs of centralized and distributed approaches have been analyzed in existing studies, no related work has been found on understanding supply chain performance based on the network attributes of the disrupted supply chain entities. In this paper, we characterize supply chains from a capability and network topological perspective and investigate the use of a distributed decision-making approach based on classical multi-agent frameworks. The performance of the distributed framework is evaluated through a comprehensive case study that investigates the performance of the supply chain as a function of the network structure and agent attributes within the network in the presence of a disruption. Comparison to a centralized decision-making approach highlights trade-offs between performance, computation time, and network communication based on the decision-making strategy and network architecture. Practitioners can use the outcomes of our studies to design response strategies based on agent capabilities, network attributes, and desired supply chain performance.

Explore related subjects

cs.MAcs.SIcs.SYeess.SY

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Mingjie Bi, Dawn M. Tilbury, Siqian Shen, Kira Barton. 2025-07-25. A Distributed Approach for Agile Supply Chain Decision-Making Based on Network Attributes. https://doi.org/10.1109/tase.2023.3339171

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Optimization without Future Compromises? Decentralized Coordination via Collective and Reinforcement Learning

Efficient resource allocation in multi-agent systems requires autonomous agents to coordinate their decisions while balancing system-wide objectives with individual costs. This becomes increasingly challenging over long time horizons, where decisions that improve the current allocation may compromise future resource allocation, while decentralized agents have limited observations of the overall system. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can learn such long-term dependencies via local observations, but directly applying it to large-scale coordination leads to rapidly growing decision spaces and inefficient training. To this end, we propose Hierarchical Reinforcement and Collective Learning (HRCL), a hierarchical framework that uses MARL to guide, rather than replace, decentralized multi-agent coordination. At the high level, MARL learns strategies that restrict the alternatives considered during coordination and guide agents in balancing system-wide and individual objectives. At the low level, agents perform efficient decentralized coordination under this strategic guidance. This separation reduces the learning space and allows short-term coordination trade-offs to be evaluated according to their long-term effects. Experiments on a synthetic benchmark show that HRCL converges substantially faster than standalone MARL and reduces system-wide and individual costs by 35.53% and 27.05%, respectively. Evaluations on energy self-management and drone swarm sensing further show improved resource allocation, power-peak regulation, and sensing efficiency. These results show that learning strategic guidance for an existing coordination process can retain scalable decentralized coordination without letting short-term decisions compromise future resource allocation.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

RideSkill: A Hierarchical Algorithm for Generalized Ride Sharing with LLM-Driven Automatic Evolution

Ride-sharing, which allows multiple passengers with different origin-destination (OD) pairs to share a single vehicle, is a challenging operational problem, as it requires orders with different OD pairs to be efficiently bundled and assigned to vehicles under uncertain and varying scenarios. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) solutions have achieved promising performance, they suffer from limited generalization (adapting to different environmental scenarios), low transferability (adapting to different platform objectives), and training difficulties in large-scale systems, such as the curse of dimensionality. Recently, motivated by the scaling of large language models (LLMs), several works have incorporated LLMs into ride-hailing systems, either by employing LLMs directly as decision-making agents or using them for automatic algorithm design. However, none of these approaches support vehicle sharing, which complicates the problem by expanding both the state and action spaces exponentially. Moreover, most of them require frequent LLM calls at inference time, making them infeasible for real-time deployment. To address these issues, we propose RideSkill, a hierarchical method for ride-sharing that leverages LLM-assisted automatic algorithmic design. RideSkill consists of a combiner that assigns appropriate skills to each vehicle from a learned skill repository, enabling adaptive dispatch under varying scenarios and objectives, and a repositioner that sequentially relocates idle vehicles to emerging regions, avoiding conflicts among vehicles. Crucially, the skill repository, combiner, and repositioner are all trained by an LLM-based automatic evolutionary method, eliminating the need for LLM calls during deployment and thus ensuring high real-time performance.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

Anchor and Perturb: Lazy Agent Remediation by Exploration Injection

Anchor and Perturb (AnP) is a lightweight framework that resolves multi-agent coordination failures by decoupling exploratory variance injection from recurrent manifold stability. Existing remediation strategies predominantly alter mixing network architectures or enforce simultaneous exploration across the collective, which inevitably precipitates severe temporal-difference penalties in non-monotonic reward spaces. Specifically, AnP isolates underperforming lazy agents and injects an asymmetric exploratory pulse into targeted coordinates whilst anchoring converged teammates to nominal greedy exploitation. Empirical telemetry benchmarks demonstrate that AnP successfully rescues collapsed joint policies (recovering from a 5% evaluation win rate nadir back to 85%) and facilitates escape from suboptimal coordination plateaus, sustaining peak win rates of 90% without requiring structural network modifications.

cs.MA↗