Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan

Multi-Agent System Interaction in Integrated SCM\ud

Coordination between organizations on strategic, tactical and operation levels leads to more effective and efficient supply chains. Supply chain management is increasing day by day in modern enterprises.. The environment is becoming competitive and many enterprises will find it difficult to survive if they do not make their sourcing, production and distribution more efficient. Multi-agent supply chain management has recognized as an effective methodology for supply chain management. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer new methods compared to conventional, centrally organized architectures in the scope of supply chain management (SCM). Since necessary data are not available within the whole supply chain, an integrated approach for production planning and control taking into account all the partners involved is not feasible. In this study we show how MAS architecture interacts in the integrated SCM architecture with the help of various intelligent agents to highlight the above problem

A survey of agent-oriented methodologies

This article introduces the current agent-oriented methodologies. It discusses what approaches have been followed (mainly extending existing object oriented and knowledge engineering methodologies), the suitability of these approaches for agent modelling, and some conclusions drawn from the survey

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Investigating grid computing technologies for use with commercial simulation packages

As simulation experimentation in industry become more computationally demanding, grid computing can be seen as a promising technology that has the potential to bind together the computational resources needed to quickly execute such simulations. To investigate how this might be possible, this paper reviews the grid technologies that can be used together with commercial-off-the-shelf simulation packages (CSPs) used in industry. The paper identifies two specific forms of grid computing (Public Resource Computing and Enterprise-wide Desktop Grid Computing) and the middleware associated with them (BOINC and Condor) as being suitable for grid-enabling existing CSPs. It further proposes three different CSP-grid integration approaches and identifies one of them to be the most appropriate. It is hoped that this research will encourage simulation practitioners to consider grid computing as a technologically viable means of executing CSP-based experiments faster