Heterogeneous Risk Management Using a Multi-Agent Framework for Supply Chain Disruption Response

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-agent framework for heterogeneous risk management in supply chains, enabling distributed, dynamic responses to disruptions considering agents' risk attitudes and uncertainties.

Contribution

It proposes a novel heterogeneous risk management mechanism that incorporates uncertainties and risk attitudes into multi-agent decision-making for supply chain disruptions.

Findings

The approach effectively handles disruptions in stochastic environments.

Agents' risk attitudes influence their disruption response decisions.

The method demonstrates feasibility and effectiveness through a simulated case study.

Abstract

In the highly complex and stochastic global, supply chain environments, local enterprise agents seek distributed and dynamic strategies for agile responses to disruptions. Existing literature explores both centralized and distributed approaches, while most work neglects temporal dynamics and the heterogeneity of the risk management of individual agents. To address this gap, this letter presents a heterogeneous risk management mechanism to incorporate uncertainties and risk attitudes into agent communication and decision-making strategy. Hence, this approach empowers enterprises to handle disruptions in stochastic environments in a distributed way, and in particular in the context of multi-agent control and management. Through a simulated case study, we showcase the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach under stochastic settings and how the decision of disruption responses changes when agents hold various risk attitudes.