Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

There are two main contributions of the work reported in the paper. First, a new model of software agents is proposed that are polymorphic and highly mobile. The former feature of agents results from the existence of potentially many agent versions. The latter feature is implied by the fact that only the necessary agent code is transmitted through the network, while the rest is transmitted only on demand.. Second, in the paper a particular approach to develop and manage multi-agent environments is proposed. It is based on so called agent clusters which group agents that mutually cooperate to perform a particular mission, e.g. to build and manage supply chains, to negotiate details of orders, to sign business contract. The approach seems to be straightforward, on one hand, and allows practically unrestricted collaboration among agents of the same business party, and safe cooperation among different business parties, on the other hand. The concept of agent cluster is inspired to some extent by the database technology, in particular by database transaction management.

Due to the increasing implementation of agile and networked manufacturing, supply chain has entered a new phase, virtual supply chain. The phase is characterized by the integration of activities, operations, and functions carried out at different and geographically distributed supply chain stages. The paper proposes an approach to the configuration of a network of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) being integrated into a supply chain. The SME supply chain configuration is based on a shared domain ontology for supply chain management, offering the configuration task as a function of supply chain management. Principles of the development of the shared ontology and possible ways of matching between enterprise and domain ontologies are considered.

This paper presents laboratory experiments to test a bottom up approach to production control and supply chain management. Built upon the successful traditional kanban (Card) system, the new intelligent system associates a kanban agent to each physical kanban. Instead of relying on demand forecast and planning, kanban agents reason about their own movements to adapt to changing demands. After previous simulations results of the intelligent system showed significant performance improvements over the traditional system, we further use the Auto-ID Laboratory at Cambridge University to test the feasibility of the idea in a realistic manufacturing environment. The results from the experiments demonstrated the superiority on several performance measures of the intelligent system compared to the traditional system used as a benchmark. Moreover, the implementation of the experiments exposed several real world constraints not shown in the simulation study and practical solutions were adopted to address these.