Self-Organizing Logistics Process Control: An Agent-Based Approach - Agents and Artificial Intelligence - page 404

Fig. 4. Number of message receivers (orders of final consumers)
Fig. 5. Customer satisfaction among the final consumers
Fig. 6. Consumption rate (utilization) among the final consumers
while the utilization is measured over the last ten attempts to consume the respective
amount of products.
For the prestructured reference configuration, Figures 5 and 6 show that there is a
short initialization phase until the inventories of the suppliers are filled high enough to
be able to fulfill the customers' orders. After that phase, the optimal values are reached
for the order fulfillment rate and the customers' utilization while the number of receivers
per order is always one by definition (Figure 4).
In the self-organizing network, these levels are not reached completely. However,
the values converge near the optimum, showing that the agents autonomously establish
one to one interaction relationships (Figure 4) that still lead to a near optimal order
fulfillment rate of more than 97% (Figure 5). The process utilization (Figure 6) as a