Increasingly, software agents are evolving from the roles of facilitators into decision-makers in managing complex, real-time systems such as logistics enterprise. Emergent behavior is that which is not attributed to any individual (agent), but is a global outcome of individual (agent) coordination. While agent's degree of autonomy and responsibility will continue to increase with time, the impact of emergent behavior in agent system on the performance and stability of these systems become an important issue. We found that emergent behavior is a major concern of potential users while we try to apply agent technology to such industry areas as transportation planning and logistics coordination. To really make agent technology work in industry convincingly, it is valuable to do a study of emergent behaviour and its impacts to the application of agent technology. This paper reviews the research on emergent behaviour, discuss its research challenge and application impact, and suggest research directions on agent emergent behaviour.

Crossdocking is defined as an operational strategy that moves items through consolidation centers or cross docks without putting them into storage. As the need to move inventory faster increases, more logistics managers are turning to crossdocking but the ability to execute such strategy well depends on good planning, dynamic scheduling and coordination. This paper introduces our research and development work on cross docking solution in three aspects: optimized planning on container grouping, clustering, sequencing and allocating containers to docks; real-time scheduling handles the dynamics of container arrivals and actual pallet transfers; and cross-docking coordination conducts real-time task assignment/sequencing and resource management to deal with dynamic changes.

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