Integrated methodological frameworks for modelling agent-based advanced supply chain planning systems: a systematic literature review

Purpose: The objective of this paper is to provide a systematic literature review of recent developments in methodological frameworks for the modelling and simulation of agent-based advanced supply chain planning systems. Design/methodology/approach: A systematic literature review is provided to identify, select and make an analysis and a critical summary of all suitable studies in the area. It is organized into two blocks: the first one covers agent-based supply chain planning systems in general terms, while the second one specializes the previous search to identify those works explicitly containing methodological aspects. Findings: Among sixty suitable manuscripts identified in the primary literature search, only seven explicitly considered the methodological aspects. In addition, we noted that, in general, the notion of advanced supply chain planning is not considered unambiguously, that the social and individual aspects of the agent society are not taken into account in a clear manner in several studies and that a significant part of the works are of a theoretical nature, with few real-scale industrial applications. An integrated framework covering all phases of the modelling and simulation process is still lacking in the literature visited. Research limitations/implications: The main research limitations are related to the period covered (last four years), the selected scientific databases, the selected language (i.e. English) and the use of only one assessment framework for the descriptive evaluation part. Practical implications: The identification of recent works in the domain and discussion concerning their limitations can help pave the way for new and innovative researches towards a complete methodological framework for agent-based advanced supply chain planning systems. Originality/value: As there are no recent state-of-the-art reviews in the domain of methodological frameworks for agent-based supply chain planning, this paper contributes to systematizing and consolidating what has been done in recent years and uncovers interesting research gaps for future studies in this emerging fieldPeer Reviewe

From supply chains to demand networks. Agents in retailing: the electrical bazaar

A paradigm shift is taking place in logistics. The focus is changing from operational effectiveness to adaptation. Supply Chains will develop into networks that will adapt to consumer demand in almost real time. Time to market, capacity of adaptation and enrichment of customer experience seem to be the key elements of this new paradigm. In this environment emerging technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency ID), Intelligent Products and the Internet, are triggering a reconsideration of methods, procedures and goals. We present a Multiagent System framework specialized in retail that addresses these changes with the use of rational agents and takes advantages of the new market opportunities. Like in an old bazaar, agents able to learn, cooperate, take advantage of gossip and distinguish between collaborators and competitors, have the ability to adapt, learn and react to a changing environment better than any other structure. Keywords: Supply Chains, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent System.Postprint (published version

Process control and configuration of a reconfigurable production system using a multi-agent software system

Thesis (M. Tech. (Information Technology)) -- Central University of technology, Free State, 2011Traditional designs for component-handling platforms are rigidly linked to the product being produced. Control and monitoring methods for these platforms consist of various proprietary hardware controllers containing the control logic for the production process. Should the configuration of the component handling platform change, the controllers need to be taken offline and reprogrammed to take the changes into account. The current thinking in component-handling system design is the notion of re-configurability. Reconfigurability means that with minimum or no downtime the system can be adapted to produce another product type or overcome a device failure. The re-configurable component handling platform is built-up from groups of independent devices. These groups or cells are each responsible for some aspect of the overall production process. By moving or swopping different versions of these cells within the component-handling platform, re-configurability is achieved. Such a dynamic system requires a flexible communications platform and high-level software control architecture to accommodate the reconfigurable nature of the system. This work represents the design and testing of the core of a re-configurable production control software platform. Multiple software components work together to control and monitor a re-configurable component handling platform. The design and implementation of a production database, production ontology, communications architecture and the core multi-agent control application linking all these components together is presented

A Configurable Matchmaking Framework for Electronic Marketplaces

E-marketplaces constitute a major enabler of B2B and B2C e-commerce activities. This paper proposes a framework for one of the central activities of e-marketplaces: matchmaking of trading intentions lodged by market participants. The framework identifies a core set of concepts and functions that are common to all types of marketplaces and can serve as the basis for describing the distinct styles of matchmaking employed within various market mechanisms. A prototype implementation of the framework based on Web services technology is presented, illustrating its ability to be dynamically configured to meet specific market needs and its potential to serve as a foundation for more fully fledged e-marketplace frameworks

Worker-robot cooperation and integration into the manufacturing workcell via the holonic control architecture

Cooperative manufacturing is a new field of research, which addresses new challenges beyond the physical safety of the worker. Those new challenges appear due to the need to connect the worker and the cobot from the informatics point of view in one cooperative workcell. This requires developing an appropriate manufacturing control system, which fits the nature of both the worker and the cobot. Furthermore, the manufacturing control system must be able to understand the production variations, to guide the cooperation between worker and the cobot and adapt with the production variations.Die kooperative Fertigung ist ein neues Forschungsgebiet, das sich neuen Herausforderungen stellt. Diese neuen Herausforderungen ergeben sich aus der Notwendigkeit, den Arbeiter und den Cobot aus der Sicht der Informatik in einem kooperativen Arbeitsplatz zu verbinden. Dies erfordert die Entwicklung eines geeigneten Produktionskontrollsystems, das sowohl der Natur des Arbeiters als auch der des Cobots entspricht. Darüber hinaus muss die Fertigungssteuerung in der Lage sein, die Produktionsschwankungen zu verstehen, um die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Arbeiter und Cobot zu steuern

Dynamic enterprise modelling: a methodology for animating dynamic social networks

PhD ThesisSince the introduction of the Internet and the realisation of its potential companies have either transformed their operation or are in the process of doing so. It has been observed, that developments in I.T., telecommunications and the Internet have boosted the number of enterprises engaging into e-commerce, e-business and virtual enterprising. These trends are accompanied by re-shaping, transformation and changes in an enterprise's boundaries. The thesis gives an account of the research into the area of dynamic enterprise modelling and provides a modelling methodology that allows different roles and business models to be tested and evaluated without the risk associated with committing to a change

Design Considerations for Incorporating Flexible Workflow and Multi-AgentInteractions in Agent Societies

In this paper, we present our conception of a Flexible Agent Society (FAS), an extension of the Contractual Agent Society (CAS) idea. Essentially, a FAS is a distributed information system modeling an agent society, providing agents with the ability to collaborate in order to meet certain common goals. In a FAS, unlike the CAS, the agents themselves have control over the workflow processesand multi-agent conversations that they need to execute in order to meet their common goals

S3-DST: Structured Open-Domain Dialogue Segmentation and State Tracking in the Era of LLMs

The traditional Dialogue State Tracking (DST) problem aims to track user preferences and intents in user-agent conversations. While sufficient for task-oriented dialogue systems supporting narrow domain applications, the advent of Large Language Model (LLM)-based chat systems has introduced many real-world intricacies in open-domain dialogues. These intricacies manifest in the form of increased complexity in contextual interactions, extended dialogue sessions encompassing a diverse array of topics, and more frequent contextual shifts. To handle these intricacies arising from evolving LLM-based chat systems, we propose joint dialogue segmentation and state tracking per segment in open-domain dialogue systems. Assuming a zero-shot setting appropriate to a true open-domain dialogue system, we propose S3-DST, a structured prompting technique that harnesses Pre-Analytical Recollection, a novel grounding mechanism we designed for improving long context tracking. To demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach in joint segmentation and state tracking, we evaluate S3-DST on a proprietary anonymized open-domain dialogue dataset, as well as publicly available DST and segmentation datasets. Across all datasets and settings, S3-DST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, demonstrating its potency and robustness the next generation of LLM-based chat systems

Knowledge based approach to flexible workflow management systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow management systems must be able to adapt themselves effectively. In this dissertation, the workflow is redefined in concept and represented with a set of business rules. Business rules play a central role in organizational workflows in context of cooperation among actors. To achieve business goals, they constrain the flow of works, use of resources, and responsibility mapping between tasks and actors using role concept. Business rules are explicitly modeled in the Knowledge-based Workflow Model (KWM) using frames. To increase the adaptability of workflow management system, KWM has several distinctive features. First, it increases expressiveness of workflow model so that exception handling rules and responsibility mapping rules between tasks and actors as well as task scheduling rules are explicitly modeled. Secondly, formal definition of KWM enables one to define and to analyze correctness of workflow schema. Knowledge-based approach enables more powerful analysis on workflow schema including checking consistency and compactness of routing rules as well as terminality of a workflow. Thirdly, providing change propagation mechanism which assures correctness of workflow after the modification of workflow schema increases adaptability. Change propagation rules for the modification primitives are provided to manage workflow evolution. On the other hand, metarules that control rules in KWM are used to handle exceptions that occur in a running workflow instance. Workflow participants can easily change workflow schema of a workflow instance with the support of extra rules and a metarule. Based on KWM, K-WFMS (Knowledge-based WorkFlow Management System) has been implemented in client/server architecture. Inference shell of knowledge-based systems is employed for enactment of business rules and integrated with database systems. From a real application based on the KWM architecture, it has been shown that system performance can increase notably by reducing the number of rules and facts that are used in the course of workflow enactment

Service-oriented control architecture for reconfigurable production systems

Evolvable and collaborative production systems are becoming an emergent paradigm towards flexibility and automatic re-configurability. The reconfiguration of those systems requires the existence of distributed and modular control components that interact in order to accomplish control activities. This paper focuses on service-oriented production systems, which behavior is regulated by the coordination of services that are provided and required by control components with different roles. Internally, these components are independent of the implementations, but an internal modular and event based structure is presented. Individual control and interaction is achieved by using embedded or inter-service control processes for which High-Level Petri Nets are proposed. Supporting the predefined control, decision support systems are used to provide conflict resolution and other decision-making functions