Intelligent Agents to Support Information Sharing in B2B E-Marketplaces

This article proposes an architecture to support information and knowledge exchange between collaborating business partners. The focus is on knowledge representation and exchange by intelligent agents to support collaborative business functions through agents that exchange problem-specific information in standardized formats. The article then shows the application of the proposed architecture in the context of an infomediary-based B2B E-marketplace

Policy, economic, and industry repercussions of current e-business diffusion rate In European food industry

European policy is focussed on promoting the business techniques and new ways of working which will provide the economic and social foundation of the information society in Europe. To help policy makers define their programmes, and to monitor the effectiveness of these policies, it is essential to examine progress as well as identify areas requiring active support. This study examined the repercussions of e-business progress in the food sector based on the findings of a large quantitative survey that investigated the extent, scope, nature of and factors affecting the speed of e-business development in Europe for the Food, beverages and tobacco sector. For this purpose a pan European survey was conducted by EU market observatory called “European e-Business Market Watch” during the period February and March 2003. This study is based on the findings and reports of “European e-Business Market Watch” which can be accessed in the Internet (www.e-businesswatch.org). This study discusses the economic implications for the individual enterprise, the industry structure as well as policy issues such as quality assurance, promotion of ICT education, training and “cultural” change. Regarding economic implications, e-business has played a indirect role because it has significantly involved only in Large Scale Enterprises which proportionally are a small percentage in food industry. For SMEs, the impact of e-business was mainly to the ICT facilities currently at their disposal: websites, the Internet, and e-mail. Regarding industry implications, e-business has not led to significant structural changes, but it has steamed up certain processes. E-business has armoured supply chain management with advanced but sophisticated network technologies. Regarding policy issues, an e-business solution capable of guaranteeing food safety to consumers and vertically integrating business operations across the supply chain would have a good chance of extraordinary diffusion in the food industry

Multi Agent Systems in Logistics: A Literature and State-of-the-art Review

Based on a literature survey, we aim to answer our main question: “How should we plan and execute logistics in supply chains that aim to meet today’s requirements, and how can we support such planning and execution using IT?†Today’s requirements in supply chains include inter-organizational collaboration and more responsive and tailored supply to meet specific demand. Enterprise systems fall short in meeting these requirements The focus of planning and execution systems should move towards an inter-enterprise and event-driven mode. Inter-organizational systems may support planning going from supporting information exchange and henceforth enable synchronized planning within the organizations towards the capability to do network planning based on available information throughout the network. We provide a framework for planning systems, constituting a rich landscape of possible configurations, where the centralized and fully decentralized approaches are two extremes. We define and discuss agent based systems and in particular multi agent systems (MAS). We emphasize the issue of the role of MAS coordination architectures, and then explain that transportation is, next to production, an important domain in which MAS can and actually are applied. However, implementation is not widespread and some implementation issues are explored. In this manner, we conclude that planning problems in transportation have characteristics that comply with the specific capabilities of agent systems. In particular, these systems are capable to deal with inter-organizational and event-driven planning settings, hence meeting today’s requirements in supply chain planning and execution.supply chain;MAS;multi agent systems

How Ontologies Can Help in an eMarketplace

Recently, ontologies have been developed in various business domains with the recent maturing of the Semantic Web technologies. However, ontology-related researches have largely focused on the facilitation of successful matchmaking but not much on traders’ requirement elicitation and potential negotiations in e-marketplaces. Because ontology provides the key knowledge about the inter-relationships among the issues and alternatives of the traders’ requirements, we show how to elicit trade requirements, alternatives, and tradeoff from an agreed ontology. This facilitates the whole business process of the e-marketplace, from matchmaking, recommendation, to negotiation. We further propose a novel methodology for the elicitation of dependencies among traders’ requirements for the formulation of an effective decision plan. As a result, traders can have a better cognition of their requirements and the overall operations of the e-marketplace can be streamlined

B2B E-Marketplace in the Procurement Supply Chain of Airlines: a Strategic Direction for the Future?

With the airline industry experiencing a global economic downturn, B2B e-Business isbecoming more and more the focus of airlines’ strategies. More recently, airlines have studiedintensively the potential of joint-procurement possibilities and have taken measures in creatingconsortia-led B2B e-Marketplaces as mediators for aggregating demand and to facilitate transactions.In academic literature, limited academic research has been undertaken in exploring the value creation of B2B e-Marketplace models in the aviation industry. The aim is to conduct a theoretical analysis to explore whether or not e-Marketplaces have the potential to add value to procurement in the aviation industry. The research focuses on the potential of B2B e-Marketplaces in terms of improving an airline’s competitiveness in its procurement value chain. The theoretical framework adopted supports the identification of barriers to success and critical success factors

Semantic web for next generation of e-commerce

Web technology left a significant impact for business transaction.The role of buyers and vendors has been replaced by informative websites where the available information of products and services could improve supply chain and delivery cycles.As the market segment grows, the need of having organized and thoughtful web content is increasing.Search functions using keyword-based search are known for its inability for the machine to interpret different terminology with the same meaning.Information needs to be structured for parametric search to locate products with certain combination of traits.Ontology is the solution to structure semantic of product data.It allows computer to process content with meaning for human based consensual terminologies.Ontology provides a shared platform and common understanding of a domain that can be communicated between user and application systems.The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of exploiting ontology based e-commerce for Semantic Web. The ontology is mediator for software agents to communicate and exchange data.These agents can search products with certain traits, negotiate products or automatically configure product or services according to the required specifications.The semantic combination of product data elevate full potential of e-commerce and development of many specialized reasoning services bring full power of Semantic Web Based E-Commerce

Software Characteristics of B2B Electronic Intermediaries: A Novel Design Science Approach

Long being seen as commercially unsuccessful after the dot-com era, web-based B2B electronic intermediaries are currentlyundergoing a renaissance driven by globalization and an ever increasing cost-pressure on procurement departments ofenterprises. These systems are getting more sophisticated almost by the day, which is also reflected by numerous relatedscientific articles. This development raises the question of the latest characteristics of such systems scientifically described.In order to answer this question, the work at hand depicts the results of a novel design science approach based on a structuredliterature review. The outcomes of this research are i) a state-of-the-art overview of scientifically described softwarecharacteristics of B2B electronic intermediaries, and ii) a taxonomy for structuring software characteristics of this type ofsystems. The results may help practitioners to further develop B2B electronic intermediaries and e-procurement systems, andwill serve as a basis for future research endeavors in the field