Advanced Information Technology Application in ERP Systems

Current Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) are used to track companies’ finances, human resources, and logistics. Upcoming market-driven requirements focus on outside connectivity and up-to-date information supply, including business-to-business support, e-commerce, and virtual enterprises. How can these requirements be met by applying emerging information technologies? This paper focuses on future development of ERP systems emphasizing on technical aspects of information technology application as enabler. It briefly discusses existing research approaches and potential research and development issues

Agents and E-commerce: Beyond Automation

The fast-growing information and communication technologies have shifted the contemporary commerce in both its information and market spaces. Businesses demand a new generation of agile and adaptive commerce systems. Towards this end, software agents, a type of autonomous artifacts, have been viewed as a promising solution. They have been taking an increasingly important part in facilitating e-commerce operations in the last two decades. This article presents a systematized overview of the diversity of agent applications in commerce. The paper argues that agents start playing more substantial role in determining social affairs. They also have a strong potential to be used to build the future highly responsive and smart e-commerce systems. The opportunities and challenges presented by proliferation of agent technologies in e-commerce necessitate the development of insights into their place in information systems research, as well as practical implications for the management

Corporate influence and the academic computer science discipline. [4: CMU]

Prosopographical work on the four major centers for computer research in the United States has now been conducted, resulting in big questions about the independence of, so called, computer science

A theoretical and practical approach to a persuasive agent model for change behaviour in oral care and hygiene

There is an increased use of the persuasive agent in behaviour change interventions due to the agent‘s features of sociable, reactive, autonomy, and proactive. However, many interventions have been unsuccessful, particularly in the domain of oral care. The psychological reactance has been identified as one of the major reasons for these unsuccessful behaviour change interventions. This study proposes a formal persuasive agent model that leads to psychological reactance reduction in order to achieve an improved behaviour change intervention in oral care and hygiene. Agent-based simulation methodology is adopted for the development of the proposed model. Evaluation of the model was conducted in two phases that include verification and validation. The verification process involves simulation trace and stability analysis. On the other hand, the validation was carried out using user-centred approach by developing an agent-based application based on belief-desire-intention architecture. This study contributes an agent model which is made up of interrelated cognitive and behavioural factors. Furthermore, the simulation traces provide some insights on the interactions among the identified factors in order to comprehend their roles in behaviour change intervention. The simulation result showed that as time increases, the psychological reactance decreases towards zero. Similarly, the model validation result showed that the percentage of respondents‘ who experienced psychological reactance towards behaviour change in oral care and hygiene was reduced from 100 percent to 3 percent. The contribution made in this thesis would enable agent application and behaviour change intervention designers to make scientific reasoning and predictions. Likewise, it provides a guideline for software designers on the development of agent-based applications that may not have psychological reactance

Working notes of the KI \u2796 Workshop on Agent Oriented Programming and Distributed Systems

Agent-oriented techniques are likely to be the next significant breakthrough in software development process. They provide a uniform approach throughout the analysis, design and implementation phases in the development life cycle. Agent-oriented techniques are a natural extension to object-oriented techniques, but while there is a whole pIethora of analysis and design methods in the object-oriented paradigm, very little work has been reported on design and analysis methods in the agent-oriented community. After surveying and examining a number of well-known object-oriented design and analysis methods, we argue that none of these methods, provide the adequate model for the design and analysis of multi-agent systems. Therefore, we propose a new agent-specific methodology that is based on and builds upon object-oriented methods. We identify three major models that need to be build during the development of multi-agent applications and describe the process of building these models