Edinburgh Napier University

  The fast emerging customer market, the increased product variety and fluctuating demand have urged manufacturers to efficiently manage their supply chain activities to outperform their rivals. Steel industries being the backbone of manufacturing oriented economies are no exception to face these challenges. The severe competition from the less capital intensive mini-mills has enforced the integrated steel mills to change their old production strategies to become more efficient in handling their customers demand. Leagile an integration of lean and agile themes has emerged as an influential concept to tackle the uncertainties existing in the supply chain. This paper therefore explores the viability of the leagile supply chain management principles in steel industries. The paper also proposes a multi agent controller framework to facilitate the autonomous execution of the supply chain related decisions. The scheduling and planning agent of the multi agent framework proposes the use of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the scheduling problem of charges in the steel industry. The paper emphasizes that the integration of leagile supply chain and use of an automated multi agent controller will enable steel industries to become more flexible and responsive to customer demands leading to reduce waste and increased profits.