Collaborative and adaptive supply chain planning

Dans le contexte industriel d'aujourd'hui, la compétitivité est fortement liée à la performance de la chaîne d'approvisionnement. En d'autres termes, il est essentiel que les unités d'affaires de la chaîne collaborent pour coordonner efficacement leurs activités de production, de façon a produire et livrer les produits à temps, à un coût raisonnable. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous croyons qu'il est nécessaire que les entreprises adaptent leurs stratégies de planification, que nous appelons comportements, aux différentes situations auxquelles elles font face. En ayant une connaissance de l'impact de leurs comportements de planification sur la performance de la chaîne d'approvisionnement, les entreprises peuvent alors adapter leur comportement plutôt que d'utiliser toujours le même. Cette thèse de doctorat porte sur l'adaptation des comportements de planification des membres d'une même chaîne d'approvisionnement. Chaque membre pouvant choisir un comportement différent et toutes les combinaisons de ces comportements ayant potentiellement un impact sur la performance globale, il est difficile de connaître à l'avance l'ensemble des comportements à adopter pour améliorer cette performance. Il devient alors intéressant de simuler les différentes combinaisons de comportements dans différentes situations et d'évaluer les performances de chacun. Pour permettre l'utilisation de plusieurs comportements dans différentes situations, en utilisant la technologie à base d'agents, nous avons conçu un modèle d'agent à comportements multiples qui a la capacité d'adapter son comportement de planification selon la situation. Les agents planificateurs ont alors la possibilité de se coordonner de façon collaborative pour améliorer leur performance collective. En modélisant les unités d'affaires par des agents, nous avons simulé avec la plateforme de planification à base d'agents de FORAC des agents utilisant différents comportements de planification dits de réaction et de négociation. Cette plateforme, développée par le consortium de recherche FORAC de l'Université Laval, permet de simuler des décisions de planification et de planifier les opérations de la chaîne d'approvisionnement. Ces comportements de planification sont des métaheurisciques organisationnelles qui permettent aux agents de générer des plans de production différents. La simulation est basée sur un cas illustrant la chaîne d'approvisionnement de l'industrie du bois d'œuvre. Les résultats obtenus par l'utilisation de multiples comportements de réaction et de négociation montrent que les systèmes de planification avancée peuvent tirer avantage de disposer de plusieurs comportements de planification, en raIson du contexte dynamique des chaînes d'approvisionnement. La pertinence des résultats de cette thèse dépend de la prémisse que les entreprises qui adapteront leurs comportements de planification aux autres et à leur environnement auront un avantage concurrentiel important sur leurs adversaires

Automated Service Negotiation Between Autonomous Computational Agents

PhDMulti-agent systems are a new computational approach for solving real world, dynamic and open system problems. Problems are conceptualized as a collection of decentralised autonomous agents that collaborate to reach the overall solution. Because of the agents autonomy, their limited rationality, and the distributed nature of most real world problems, the key issue in multi-agent system research is how to model interactions between agents. Negotiation models have emerged as suitable candidates to solve this interaction problem due to their decentralised nature, emphasis on mutual selection of an action, and the prevalence of negotiation in real social systems. The central problem addressed in this thesis is the design and engineering of a negotiation model for autonomous agents for sharing tasks and/or resources. To solve this problem a negotiation protocol and a set of deliberation mechanisms are presented which together coordinate the actions of a multiple agent system. In more detail, the negotiation protocol constrains the action selection problem solving of the agents through the use of normative rules of interaction. These rules temporally order, according to the agents' roles, communication utterances by specifying both who can say what, as well as when. Specifically, the presented protocol is a repeated, sequential model where offers are iteratively exchanged. Under this protocol, agents are assumed to be fully committed to their utterances and utterances are private between the two agents. The protocol is distributed, symmetric, supports bi and/or multi-agent negotiation as well as distributive and integrative negotiation. In addition to coordinating the agent interactions through normative rules, a set of mechanisms are presented that coordinate the deliberation process of the agents during the ongoing negotiation. Whereas the protocol normatively describes the orderings of actions, the mechanisms describe the possible set of agent strategies in using the protocol. These strategies are captured by a negotiation architecture that is composed of responsive and deliberative decision mechanisms. Decision making with the former mechanism is based on a linear combination of simple functions called tactics, which manipulate the utility of deals. The latter mechanisms are subdivided into trade-off and issue manipulation mechanisms. The trade-off mechanism generates offers that manipulate the value, rather than the overall utility, of the offer. The issue manipulation mechanism aims to increase the likelihood of an agreement by adding and removing issues into the negotiation set. When taken together, these mechanisms represent a continuum of possible decision making capabilities: ranging from behaviours that exhibit greater awareness of environmental resources and less to solution quality, to behaviours that attempt to acquire a given solution quality independently of the resource consumption. The protocol and mechanisms are empirically evaluated and have been applied to real world task distribution problems in the domains of business process management and telecommunication management. The main contribution and novelty of this research are: i) a domain independent computational model of negotiation that agents can use to support a wide variety of decision making strategies, ii) an empirical evaluation of the negotiation model for a given agent architecture in a number of different negotiation environments, and iii) the application of the developed model to a number of target domains. An increased strategy set is needed because the developed protocol is less restrictive and less constrained than the traditional ones, thus supporting development of strategic interaction models that belong more to open systems. Furthermore, because of the combination of the large number of environmental possibilities and the size of the set of possible strategies, the model has been empirically investigated to evaluate the success of strategies in different environments. These experiments have facilitated the development of general guidelines that can be used by designers interested in developing strategic negotiating agents. The developed model is grounded from the requirement considerations from both the business process management and telecommunication application domains. It has also been successfully applied to five other real world scenarios

Use of videotape learning packages : a marital enrichment field experiment with two delivery systems

The purposes of this study were (a) to evaluate the effectiveness of two procedures (traditional group workshop and individual telephone conference/mail) for training home economics Extension agents to use videotape resources in working with married couples, and (b) to design, implement, and evaluate videotape learning packages for facilitating married couples' interpersonal competence skills in self-understanding, communication, and growth toward states of consensus and commitment to their relationships. Videotape learning packages were utilized by Extension agents acting as leaders with groups of married couples. The sample consisted of 50 married couples and 10 agent-leaders from 10 counties in two Agricultural Extension Service districts. Thirty-nine couples attended a series of four videotape/discussion programs and responded to pre-post inventories. Eleven control couples who did not attend the series also responded

Tecnologías de la información y llegar a la sociedad de la información

El rápido desarrollo de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación ha hecho que los países que utilizan estas tecnologías sean un paso adelante en la competencia mundial. Gracias a las contribuciones de las organizaciones públicas, privadas y no gubernamentales de todo el mundo desde principios de los años noventa, se ha avanzado considerablemente en llegar a la sociedad de la información. La edad en la que vivimos se llama la era de la información. En esta sociedad donde el conocimiento se convierte en poder, se espera mucho de los individuos. Es necesario que las personas puedan acceder a la información por sí mismas, cuestionar la información que obtienen, usarla de acuerdo con sus necesidades y tener la capacidad de pensar científicamente. En este estudio, se utilizó el análisis de documentos escritos. A este respecto, el análisis de documentos escritos y documentos es un método de recopilación de información utilizado en la investigación cualitativa para respaldar la información obtenida tanto por sí misma como para la entrevista y la observació

The politics and practice of trans-culturation: importing and translating Chinese autobiographical writings into the British Literary Field

This study examines the social, cultural and institutional factors and circumstances surrounding the process of importing and translating six Chinese autobiographical writings in the British context. In parallel, it conducts a critical reading of the press reviews of these six books to map out and discuss the representations of Chinese culture and society as outcomes of the translation process (with the translation process understood in the broad sense to include the selection of the source text for translation as well as the actual translating activities). The investment in Chinese autobiographies set in 'Red China' and their uptake by the UK readership have become a prominent phenomenon over the last two decades or so. This phenomenon poses several questions around the criteria on the basis of which this specific genre has been selected and imported into the British literary market and the way it is translated. In this study I use a sociologically-orientated methodological and theoretical framework that takes into account the socio-cultural contexts of translation which then features as an instance of social reproduction. In addition to the press reviews, this study uses as primary data the accounts, views and experiences of the people who have been involved in the translation process, including the literary agent and the publishers who have not received enough attention in the recent sociologically-orientated approach despite their decisive role with regard to many aspects of the translation process. My research thus examines translation from the perspectives of social agents and their interactive relationships within institutional contexts that shape the agents' activities. Based on semi-structured interviews with the participants who were involved in the translation process of the six autobiographies, this study focuses, firstly, on the selection and importing of six Chinese auto/biographical writings for translation and the role of the social agents involved, with particular attention given to the literary agent. Selecting and importing the originals are seen as a formative stage in translation, involving the actions of a range of social agents situated within different yet overlapping institutional contexts: namely, literary agents, publishers, translators and authors. Secondly, this study focuses on the actual translating process, considered in the light of its interplay with the evaluation of the 'good' translation and the editing process, to examine the extent to which the social and professional interactions and negotiations between translators and other social agents - writers, literary agents and editors - affect the way translators translate. Then, based on a critical textual analysis of the press reviews of the six translated Chinese auto/biographical wrings that appeared in the UK daily newspapers, this study examines how the reviewers represent and frame the truth-value and witness voices through the translated self-writings, and how these reviews anticipate and mediate the readers' perceptions of Communist Chinese history and society. My findings suggest that the power relations underpinning the struggles, competitions, negotiations and collaborations within the publishing and literary fields shape the translation process where literary agents, publishers/editors, translators and authors interact and negotiate to yield the final product for the British book market. The selection process is shown to be a decisive step in the process of translation, which to a great extent shapes the way the Chinese autobiographies have been translated and received. Translation, thus, plays a significant role in anticipating, (re)constructing and reshaping the (existing) representations of Contemporary Chinese culture and society

Aims, motives, and reasons

This thesis is intended primarily as an attempt at clarifying some of the traditional theories and concepts connected with the concept of motivation. It has stemmed, naturally enough, from an initial interest in the topic for its own sake, but this interest has rapidly developed into a strong sense of dissatisfaction with those theories which claim to advance an exhaustive account of the topic, when they have really only touched on one or two (albeit important) aspects of the general problem. The result is a piece of work which may well give the impression of being essentially both negative and critical. I cannot accept that this is really so. Admittedly, there are places in what follows where I have not had the confidence to substitute for the particular theory which has been criticised a satisfactory alternative account; but then to demand that one should do so suggests the assumption that concepts in general - and perhaps the concept of motivation in particular - find their application within certain fairly narrowly defined boundaries. Wittgenstein convincingly showed, in connection with the concept of a game, that we need not suppose that an activity has any one defining characteristic in order to qualify for inclusion under a certain concept. The concept of motive is not quite in this category, but we ought, I think, to be led by Wittgenstein's example to be on our guard against any suggestion that the concept is easily locatable by reference to a few simple paradigms.But it is not only the case, with respect to the theories which have been considered, that I want to say 'But the meaning of motive is not exhausted in this account, for look at this situation.... ': I want further to make it obvious, by giving each chapter a fairly independent treatment, that it will often be inappropriate to describe a theory of motivation as wrong, or misleading, or even inadequate - even though on independent grounds it may be so. What one ma want to say is that the account satisfies an enquiry into human behaviour, either in the general or in the particular, at a certain level. Of course it is true, as we shall see in Chapter II for example, that many motives name a disposition, a propensity, or a tendency which will find expression in a law -like proposition. But to proffer such a proposition in an attempt to explain someone's action is not always either a welcome or a helpful gesture. We may be more anxious to discover the immediate reason why the agent did what he did, and perhaps why he did it at that moment and not at any other. There will be times when the answer to this kind of enquiry will be in the nature of a causal account, where such an account cannot be substituted for the statement of a man's motive. But not all 'immediate' reasons for action will fall into this class, as some of the examples of Chapters I, III, and V may help to demonstrate.Then again, I have argued in the latter part of Chapter III that motives or reasons for action must often be seen as derivable from the social context in which one finds oneself, that it is thus that they gain their explanatory value (a view which has been foreshadowed in the concluding sections of Chapter II); but it hardly needs stating that there is a distinction between this question and the question of what function a man is performing when he asserts his own or another's motive. These are just two ways of approaching the general topic, and one need not assume that they encroach upon one another.The notion of clarification often provokes, especially among antagonists of linguistic philosophy, accusations of presumption. I do not see myself called upon to defend my general approach: it already occupies a comfortable position well within the boundaries of philosophy. But one might say of the claim to clarify that this may be justified on the general ground that understanding a concept is not just a matter of knowing how to use a word correctly: for this purpose a dictionary would adequately suffice. It is rather a matter, from a philosophical point of view, of being able to draw out the implications of its use. It is one thing to be told that a 4. motive is the reason which an agent gives to explain his action, but it is philosophically more interesting to discuss, for example, whether acting from a motive is a criterion for saying that a person decided or chose to do what he did. This is a question with which Chapter I is primarily concerned, and it is further discussed in the earlier section of Chapter VI. Then again, are we to say that in acting from a motive a man is necessarily aware of what he is doing? And what are the differences between acting from a motive and acting from force of habit? These are questions which can be answered not by abstract examination of concepts (if this was ever a meaningful notion in any case) but by looking at situations in the concrete and considering the kind of statements a man makes in answer to enquiries of this or that kind. The second part of Chapter VI is an extended empirical investigation of this nature in which I have given a fairly detailed account of certain sections of Francois Mauriac's novel Therese in order to illustrate how the motivated and the intended gradually blurs into the unmotivated and the unintended