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equipment is about 50 percent of a delivered commercial ship, the percentage will be 75 higher in the
passenger liner. So decrease the purchasing cost, simplify the procedure, and implement just in time
purchasing is the critical factor to the enterprise. In shipbuilding industry, more and more shipyards
begin to realize the importance of supply chain management. Japan, Korea and USA have initiated the
related research on SCM and its implementation.
In this paper, 4 parts are divided. Section 2 of this article reviews the research on supply chain
management and intelligent agent. Section 3 analyzes the business process model in shipbuilding SCM
and designs the agent based supply chain. Section 4 brief describes the implementation of the
prototype of a shipbuilding supply chain management system which based on mobile agent technology
- IBM Aglet, the prototype mainly focuses on the purchasing of the material and marine equipment in
the global market. Finally, the conclusion and future research is provided in section 5.

2 RELATED RESEARCH
Supply chain management began in 1980s. Supply chain management focuses on systems and
processes to support the flow of information within and between organizations which occurs in the
context of procurement, manufacturing, sales, distributions of goods, information and services [''I. The
dynamic, unpredictable business environment of today further demands considerable process
flexibility along the supply chain as a firm's set of commercial suppliers, customers, trading partners
and even strategic allies - together defining its supply chain topology - may now shift both abruptly
and frequently. In SCM, traditional ED1 lacks the flexibility and efficiency required for the state of art
electronic business. Even such web based e-commerce applications do not satisfy these joint
requirements for process integration and flexibility, as most of web based supply chain technologies
fail to closely integrate buyer and seller processes, they are developed predominately for either the
buyer or seller, but not both[41.
Fortunately, recent emerging technology - Intelligent Agent provides the potential and capability for
buyer-seller integration and flexibility in SCM ["I. There are many definition of intelligent agent, but at
here, agent is defined as a component of software andlor hardware which is capable of acting
exactingly in order to accomplish tasks on behalf of its user. It has the following attributes["].
0 Autonomous
0 Social function
Reactive
Proactive
0 Mobile

Fox 16* firstly use cooperative agent network to represent the supply chain, in which each agent
represent one or multi function of supply chain, and coordinate with other agents to reach the optimal
status. Swaminathan["l use a multi agent framework to model the supply chain, in which exist two
categories of element: structural elements and control elements. Structural elements including
production elements (retailers, distribution centers, plants, suppliers) and transportation elements are
modeled as agents. Control elements (inventory, demand, supply, flow and information controls) are
used to help in coordinating flow of products in an efficient manner with the use of messages. Br~gali[~]
use the mobile java agent in supply chain management, which facilitate the enterprise response to the
market's change, and optimize the whole supply chain. P.Dasgupta['' use Java mobile agent technology
to build a networked electronic trading system. T.Weitzel[12] provide an XML based B2B
communication architecture that provide the solution to expensive and inflexible ED1 connections.

There are many complex processes in shipbuilding industry, now more and more focus is put on SCM.
Korea shipyard has initiated a project of electronic supply purchasing system. In USA, the