Page 398 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 373
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and GuoJun Zhou (Eds)
Q 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

MOBILE AGENT BASED SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT IN
SHIPBUILDING INDUSTRY

Jing-Yun Cheng, Bei Lu and Sheng-Kun Zhang

School of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, 200030, China

ABSTRACT
Now China shipbuilding industry faces the following serious problems: low productivity and long
construction period. In order to cope with it, a mobile agent based supply chain management solution
is provided. Firstly, summarizes the related research of supply chain management and intelligent agent
and their application in shipbuilding industry. Secondly, a general commerce model which was
developed by HAAS School of Business is used to design a shipbuilding supply chain management.
Then implements a prototype which is based on IBM Aglet - a mobile Java agent development kit.
The paper ends with some conclusions and suggestion for future research.

KEYWORDS
Shipbuilding, Supply Chain Management, Mobile Agent

1 INTRODUCTION

Shipbuilding is a typical make-to-order manufacturing, which is very complex and complicate. In
order to survive in the competitive global shipbuilding market, each shipyard tries its best to take
measure to decrease the cost, enhance the quality and etc. For shipyard in China, the dificulties
confronted with are more serious. For example, in 1980s, the cost per tonnage is about 30 percent to 40
percent lower than shipyard in Japan. But since 1992, with the increasing of the cost of material,
marine equipment and work force, then the shipbuilding cost has been increasing with 16.9 percent per
year. Moreover, in other aspects such as quality, just in time delivery and level of management &
technology, Chinese shipyard lags Japan, Korea, and European shipyards.

How can we cope with these challenges? In current global agile competition environment, only the
enterprise who can put a stress not only on high quality, productivity, and reduced cost, but also on the
ability to react quickly and effectively to changes in markets. During the implementation of agile
manufacturing, supply chain management (SCM) has been utilized widely, which can reduce the cost,
improve the productivity and efficiency of management, and shorten the period of product’s R&D. In
the commercial shipbuilding, according to statistics and ERIM research[’], the cost of material and