The current trends and recent changes in logistics lead to new, complex and partially conflicting requirements for logistic planning and control systems. Due to the distributed nature of logistics the usage of agent technology is promising. Due to the mobile nature of logistics the usage of mobile agent technology is promising as well. Scenarios of usage of mobile agents in logistics are presented, a notation for those scenarios is defined and it is shown analytically in which cases the usage of mobile agent is superior to conventional communication. The main variable under study is the fan out, which is the number of partners a mobile agent needs to communicate with.

-Evolution of autonomous cooperation pulls away the traditional centralized approaches towards the decentralized approaches in logistic networks. In this concept, knowledge and decisions are distributed among the participants of the logistic process. Vehicles and goods become intelligent, interactive, and capable of deciding about how to achieve their aims. Software agent technology provides a means of bringing about autonomy by information sharing and decision-making capabilities. This paper presents the approach of integrating agent technology and knowledge management approaches like clustering techniques to ensure robust and efficient planning and scheduling in the transportation domain. Logistic entities are represented as software agents, where the objective is to cluster these entities which have common goals -like packages having the same destination, same type of packages, etc. The approach of autonomy through software agents and clustering techniques is expected to significantly decrease the communication demand imposed upon the logistic network for a set of required tasks to be performed. An enhanced clustering algorithm has been applied on a logistic scenario and compared with the original algorithm in terms of effective cluster formation with less iteration. This approach identifies challenges in the area of communication that arise from the distributed decision process and the interacting components.

Due to the growing complexity of logistic processes, "Autonomous Cooperating Logistic Processes" are considered as a way to handle this complexity growth (Scholz-Reiter et al. 2004). In this concept, knowledge and decisions are distributed among the participants of the logistic process. Vehicles and goods become intelligent, interactive, and capable of deciding about how to achieve their aims.Logistic components may have common aims, e.g., several goods that are at the same location and have the same destination. In such a case, it can be sensible to form communities of those components and determine a community leader that acts on behalf of all members. It is expected that thereby, the required communication among the logistic components can be optimized.This paper identifies challenges in the area of communication that arise from the distributed decision process and the interacting components. An approach to form clusters among the goods is proposed to address these challenges.

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