Title: Customer order fulfilment in mass customisation context - an agent-based approach

Authors: Khaled Medini

Addresses: Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, 158 Cours Fauriel, 42023 Saint-Étienne, France

Abstract: The ever increasing customer specific needs require suitable strategies to accommodate his requirements and deliver exactly what he wants and in due course. Mass customisation, as a successor of mass production is one of these strategies, it aims at satisfying customer needs with near mass production efficiency. However, achieving efficiency is challenged by several issues such as customer order fulfilment in a customisation environment. In fact, product variety induced by customer choices requires flexible production systems able to manage internal complexity caused by such external variety. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based model to manage customer orders by: 1) defining production requirements of each order; 2) simulating the execution of the production and delivery operations. It then illustrates the proposed model with a case study and investigates the impact of inventory management on the enterprise economic performance. The case study shows how the model supports the decision-making process with respect to customer order fulfilment.

Keywords: order fulfilment; mass customisation; multi-agent systems; MAS; dynamic scheduling; performance evaluation; decision making; agent-based systems; customer orders; simulation; inventory management; firm performance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2015.072525

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2015 Vol.10 No.4, pp.334 - 349

Received: 24 Jul 2014
Accepted: 10 Mar 2015
Published online: 16 Oct 2015 *

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