Information Sharing in Supply Chains

This monograph by Jason Shiu Kong Lau aims at investigating appropriate levels of information sharing, which can yield benefits close to full information sharing. The book deals with the investigation of appropriate levels of information sharing; the associated coordination methods in three supply chain problems: inventory replenishment, distributed project scheduling and rescheduling; the establishing of a framework for investigating impacts of sharing production information among enterprises in supply chains. Through the use of multi-agent-based approach to modeling supply chains, this book shows that appropriate levels of information sharing performs close to, or even better than full information sharing. This work provides insights to improve performance of the supply chains in which full information sharing and centralized problem solving are not practical. With the aid of Internet and multi-agent technologies, practitioners in small and medium-sized enterprises can reduce barriers and costs of sharing information and, hence, implementing supply chain management.