A multi-agent-based novel framework for flexible and tailorable modeling and smart simulation for supply chains

To achieve competitive advantage in today’s global markets, supply chains need to be reconfigured in order to respond to unpredictable changes. Aiming to enable and deliver agile responses and rapid reaction, we propose a multi-agent framework for flexible modeling and simulation of supply chains using reconfigurable production cells. Our novel approach will enable the structural model and the controller model to be considered separately, and enable high quality simulation models to be rapidly built and reconfigured using relevant production cells. To accomplish these capabilities, a four-layered conceptual modeling framework is proposed, which provides an adaptable and tailorable mechanism to support simulation model reconfiguration. In addition, two categories of reconfigurable production cells can be extracted from the bottom layer of the framework to help users to quickly create a conceptual model using functional “building” blocks or templates

Design of Multi Agent Based Crowd Injury Model

A major concern of many government agencies is to predict and control the behavior of crowds in different situations. Many times such gatherings are legal, legitimate, and peaceful. But there are times when they can turn violent, run out of control, result in material damages and even casualties. It then becomes the duty of governments to bring them under control using a variety of techniques, including non-lethal and lethal weapons, if necessary. In order to aid decision makers on the course of action in crowd control, there are modeling and simulation tools that can provide guidelines by giving programmed rules to computer animated characters and to observe behaviors over time in appropriate scenarios. A crowd is a group of people attending a public gathering, with some joint purpose, such as protesting government or celebrating an event. In some countries these kinds of activities are the only way to express public\u27s displeasure with their governments. The governments\u27 reactions to such activities may or may not be tolerant. For these reasons, such situations must be eliminated by recognizing when and how they occur and then providing guidelines to mitigate them. Police or military forces use non-lethal weapons (NLWs), such as plastic bullets or clubs, to accomplish their job. In order to simulate the results of such actions in a computer, there is a need to determine the physical effects of NLWs over the individuals in the crowd. In this dissertation, a fuzzy logic based crowd injury model for determining the physical effects of NLWs is proposed. Fuzzy logic concepts can be applied to a problem by using linguistic rules, which are determined by problem domain experts. In this case, a group of police and military officers were consulted for a set of injury model rules and those rules were then included in the simulation platform. As a proof of concept, a prototype system was implemented using the Repast Simphony agent based simulation toolkit. Simulation results illustrated the effectiveness of the simulation framework