Abstract: “Today enterprises are facing increasing problems in adapting to sudden changes in the market requirements as also to cater to multiple geographies and to shorter product lifecycle times. Various supply chain problems like parts paucity, excessive finished good inventories, unused plant capacity, excessive warehousing costs, and inefficient transportation of supplies and finished goods are causing huge losses to companies. E-supply chain management using software agents has the benefit of solving the tasks by various participants in the supply chain network through their local intelligence and problem-solving paradigms. Using agent-based technologies, various stakeholders, suppliers, manufacturers and transporters can negotiate through dialogue and interaction mechanisms and distribute various activities in a decentralized manner more efficiently. Applications of software agents in various activities of the supply chain like production planning, production monitoring, workflow modeling,”

Keywords: agents, e-supply chain, intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, negotiation, scheduling