Sharing is caring: data sharing in multi-agent supply chains

TL;DR

This paper explores how data sharing strategies in multi-agent supply chains influence system performance, highlighting that truthful sharing benefits low demand scenarios while strategic lying can improve overall outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-agent model with flexible data sharing strategies, including lying, and demonstrates their impact on supply chain performance under different demand conditions.

Findings

Truthful sharing improves low demand scenarios.

Lying can slightly enhance overall system performance.

Data sharing combined with reward shaping boosts efficiency.

Abstract

Modern supply networks are complex interconnected systems. Multi-agent models are increasingly explored to optimise their performance. Most research assumes agents will have full observability of the system by having a single policy represent the agents, which seems unrealistic as this requires companies to share their data. The alternative is to develop a Hidden-Markov Process with separate policies, making the problem challenging to solve. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent system where the factory agent can share information downstream, increasing the observability of the environment. It can choose to share no information, lie, tell the truth or combine these in a mixed strategy. The results show that data sharing can boost the performance, especially when combined with a cooperative reward shaping. In the high demand scenario there is limited ability to change the strategy and therefore no data sharing approach benefits both agents. However, lying benefits the factory enough for an overall system improvement, although only by a relatively small amount compared to the overall reward. In the low demand scenario, the most successful data sharing is telling the truth which benefits all actors significantly.