ROUTE FINDING FOR FACILITATING TRANSPORTATION PLANNING TO MAINTAIN SMOOTH PRODUCT FLOW IN SUPPLY CHAIN

Purpose: To gain more profit and market share, manufacturers wish to mobilize as many resources as they can to satisfy every manufacturing order. As Manufacturing is nowadays distributed to several sites, where each site manufacture the intermediate product to assemble the final product. Methodology: Producers, therefore require to transport these products between these sites as well as distribute the final products to faraway customers. Therefore production and transportation planning need to be coordinated. Manufacturing requires the planning of unmovable resources (machines) with fixed sequences of production routing steps, however transportation requires the planning of moveable resources (Vehicles). Findings: Each transport request is different from another with different origin and destination. Hence, it is needed to find the routing (route from origin to destination) of each transport request dynamically. Practical Implications: This paper is dedicated to present a route finding tool called Path Finder in order to provide shortest route by distance or time or both for transportation planning. Keywords: Multi Agent System, Collaborative networks, Transportation planning, Simulation.