Trade restrictions, the COVID-19 pandemic, and geopolitical conflicts has significantly exposed vulnerabilities within traditional global supply chains. These events underscore the need for organisations to establish more resilient and flexible supply chains. To address these challenges, the concept of the autonomous supply chain (ASC), characterised by predictive and self-decision-making capabilities, has recently emerged as promising solution. However, research on ASCs is relatively limited, with no existing studies on their implementations. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting an implementation of ASC using a multi-agent approach. It proposes a methodology for the analysis and design of such an agent-based ASC system (A2SC). This paper provides a concrete case study, the autonomous meat supply chain, which showcases the practical implementation of the A2SC system using the proposed methodology. Additionally, a system architecture and a toolkit for developing A2SC systems are presented. Despite with limitations, this paper demonstrates a promising approach for implementing an effective ASC system.

翻译：贸易限制、新冠疫情及地缘政治冲突显著暴露了传统全球供应链的脆弱性。此类事件凸显了组织构建更具韧性与灵活性的供应链的必要性。为应对这些挑战，具备预测性与自主决策能力的自主供应链（ASC）概念近期被提出，成为富有前景的解决方案。然而，关于ASC的研究相对有限，且尚无针对其实现方案的相关探索。本文旨在通过采用多智能体方法实现ASC来填补这一研究空白，并提出一种用于分析与设计此类基于智能体的自主供应链系统（A2SC）的方法论。本文以自主肉类供应链为具体案例，展示了运用所提方法论实现A2SC系统的实际应用。此外，本文还给出了A2SC系统的体系架构及开发工具包。尽管存在局限性，本文仍展示了一种实现有效ASC系统的可行路径。