Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
number of components to manufacture 56628 PCs:
RFQ1,1452,10
,
RFQ2,2178,25
,
.
Once all these RFQs have been sent to the suppliers on day 0, the agent will receive
offers for all or some of them on day 1. The basic version of the strategy considers
accepting only complete or earliest complete offers whose delivery date is below a Cut-
Off-Date, which is set to 180 considering that suppliers can delay the deliveries. This
very simple strategy has a number of shortcomings:
RFQ3,2904,49
,
RFQ4,3630,81
,
RFQ5,3993,121
1. It does not take into account that suppliers may not reply to all of the RFQs sent
by the agents. If some of them are not matched by offers, the agent will end up with a
number of unusable components in the inventory.
2. The same situation as above occurs if the agent receives offers with a delivery date
above the Cut-Off-Date, which will not be accepted.
3. Suppliers can make offers with a delivery date below the Cut-Off-Date, but with a
significant deviation from the requested date. This would cause the agent to wait for
deliveries, which may lead to poor factory utilisation for a significant number of days
due to lack of essential components.
4. If the components are received on time, the agent may exhaust them quite early in
the game and then it remains idle.
5. The suppliers' delays may lead to gaps in the production.
To tackle the first two shortcomings, the agent detects on day 1 those RFQs that did
not receive any offers from the suppliers, and also those that were not accepted by the
agent because the offered delivery date was above the Cut-Off-Date. In both cases, this
generates new RFQs which are re-sent to the suppliers. This process is carried out ev-
ery day from day 1 onwards until the agent has received and accepted offers for all its
RFQs.
Although this improvement helps, it does not solve the problem of lacking compo-
nents of one or more types during a period in the game. If the agent has no memories,
for instance, it cannot manufacture any PCs. This is because, although the supplier can
supply the agent with the requested quantity this may be some time after all the other
components essential for the production of specific types of PCs have been received. To
tackle this, Socrates does not to accept earliest complete offers whose delivery date is
greater than the requested date plus a fixed number of days, which was experimentally
determined and set to a value between 30-40, and accepts partial offers instead (if any).
The agent keeps track of the quantity of missing components of each type:
MissingComp[compId] = MissingComp[compId] + QRequested-QAccepted
Where every element in the array
MissingComp[]
is a type of component identified by
compId
;
MissingComp[compId]
is the existing quantity of missing components of type
compId
(generated due to previous partial offers accepted);
QRequested
is the quantity
of components requested in the RFQ; and
QAccepted
is the quantity of components ac-
cepted in the partial offer. The missing quantities are then reordered in smaller quantities
(400 components each). When suppliers send offers in response to these new RFQs, the
agent accepts either partially complete or partial offers and keeps track of the number
of missing components.
