Study On Several Problems For Decision In Agile Supply Chain Management

During the last decade, the world has changed from being a market place with several large, almost independent markets, to a highly integrated global market demanding a large variety of products, complying with high quality, reliability and environmental standards. Moreover, today's more demanding customers, the fast development of new products and the increasing competitiveness of the market players have turned the market into a highly dynamic environment. Therefore, the challenge of today's enterprises is to find novel ways to run their businesses to become more flexible, reliable, and responsive. Agile supply chain has emerged as a technology that provides more accurate allocation of costs to products or activities by their usage of company resources.In this dissertation, we focus on several important decision problems in agile supply chain management, combined with the project sponsored by the national 863 programs. This dissertation is mainly concerned with several critical decision making problems including cooperative decision-making framework, inter-organizational relationship strategy, risk management and risk control mechanism, profit allocation policy and performance measurement method in agile supply chain management.In chapter 1, the development and characteristics of advanced manufacturing technologies and management mode are reviewed and the inevitability of research on agile supply chain is analyzed. The decision-making problems in agile supply chain management are discussed in detail; the research necessity about them and the objective of this dissertation is then pointed out. The research frame is presented after the state of the art and research status in related agile supply chain decision-making problems are reviewed.Chapter 2 deals with the information integrated and sharing problems in the distributed operation environment of agile supply chain. Firstly, the characteristics of decision activities in agile supply chain management are analyzed. The agent and its organization structure, as well as the communication mechanics between agents are studied in depth. The application, constitution and design method of multi-agent system in agile supply chain cooperative decision-making framework are illuminated. The architecture of data warehouse linked with OLAP in agile supply chain decision-making environment is discussed. The design, implementation and maintenance schemes for data warehouse are proposed and a web-based data warehouse framework is presented. In the end, a conceptual DSS architecture model based on multi-agent system and data warehouse for agile supply chain management is shown.Agile supply chain management is required to put more emphases on inter-organizational cooperation and collaboration. The inter-organizational cooperative relationship strategy in partnership decision-making is studied in chapter 3. To address this problem, this dissertation provides an in-depth study of information economics and game theory. The definition and classification of inter-organizational relationship are discussed firstly. The behavior policies under different conditions in the process of establishing the relationship are analyzed, and the coordinative negotiation models are established. An auction theoretic model for coordination using a game-theoretical approach is also proposed. Moreover, the inter-organizational cooperative relationship in agile supply chain is abstracted as principal-agent relation, and a cooperativerelationship model is introduced by adopting the principal-agent theory.Reasonable mechanics of benefit sharing and risk allocation between partners is helpful for enhancing the performance and efficiency in agile supply chain operation. Unfortunately, the potential risk and uncertainty is vital to operation in agile supply chain environment. In chapter 4, the risk and uncertainty occurring in agile supply chain operation process are analyzed firstly, and the content of risk management is proposed. Three risk concerned decision questions in agile supply chai...