28,451 research outputs found
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
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
Reactive scheduling using a multi-agent model: the SCEP framework
Multi-agent systems have been successfully applied to the scheduling problem for some time. However, their use often leads to poorly unsatisfactory disappointing results. A new multi-agent model, called supervisor, customers, environment, producers (SCEP), is suggested in this paper. This model, developed for all types of planning activities, introduces a dialogue between two communities of agents leading to a high level of co-operation. Its two main interests are the following: first it provides a more efficient control of the consequences generated by the local decisions than usual systems to each agent, then the adopted architecture and behaviour permit an easy co-operation between the different SCEP models, which can represent different production functions such as manufacturing, supply management, maintenance or different workshops. As a consequence, the SCEP model can be adapted to a great variety of scheduling/planning problems. This model is applied to the basic scheduling problem of flexible manufacturing systems, andit permits a natural co-habitation between infinite capacity scheduling processes, performedby the manufacturing orders, and finite capacity scheduling processes, performed by the machines. It also provides a framework in order to react to the disturbances occurring at different levels of the workshop
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