Multi-Agent Digital Twinning for Collaborative Logistics: Framework and Implementation

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-agent digital twin platform for collaborative logistics, enhancing stakeholder cooperation and system integration to reduce carbon emissions, demonstrated through a practical testbed implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel multi-agent system architecture integrating digital twins with physical assets for collaborative logistics, including a functional implementation and demonstration.

Findings

Effective integration of agents and digital twins in logistics

Enhanced stakeholder collaboration through the platform

Practical demonstration via a carrier collaboration scenario

Abstract

Collaborative logistics has been widely recognised as an effective avenue to reduce carbon emissions by enhanced truck utilisation and reduced travel distance. However, stakeholders' participation in collaborations is hindered by information-sharing barriers and the absence of integrated systems. We, thus, in this paper addresses these barriers by investigating an integrated platform that foster collaboration through the integration of agents with digital twins. Specifically, we employ a multi-agent system approach to integrate stakeholders and physical mobile assets in collaborative logistics, representing them as agents. We introduce a loosely-coupled system architecture that facilitates the connection between physical and digital systems, enabling the integration of agents with digital twins. Using this architecture, we implement the platform (or testbed). The resulting testbed, comprising a physical environment and a digital replica, is a digital twin that integrates distributed entities involved in collaborative logistics. The effectiveness of the testbed is demonstrated through a carrier collaboration scenario. This paper is among the earliest few efforts to investigate the integration of agents and digital twin concepts and goes beyond the conceptual discussion of existing studies to the technical implementation of such integration.