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

INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CRISIS: An Empirical Analysis of Industrial Policies in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019, 2019

This paper gauges the forces and structures that shape economic transformation through an analysis of industrial polices in four European economies since the 2008 crisis: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. We argue that differences across recent European industrial policies respond to variations in national historical and institutional legacies; the characteristics of productive structures and the capabilities of the state. Pathdependency shapes views regarding the acceptable role of the state, although institutional legacies need to be balanced against historical institutional consistency and the intensity of the crisis. The characteristics of industry in terms of size, specialization, and position in the global division of labor affect preferences for framework versus sector-specific policies and the ambitiousness of goals. Finally, the state’s coordination capacity is essential to the design and efficient implementation of interrelated actions across multiple areas whereas financial capacity establishes commitment, signals priorities, and determines the feasibility of forward-looking projects

A failure recovery planning prototype for Space Station Freedom

NASA is investigating the use of advanced automation to enhance crew productivity for Space Station Freedom in numerous areas, including failure management. A prototype is described that uses various advanced automation techniques to generate courses of action whose intents are to recover from a diagnosed failure, and to do so within the constraints levied by the failure and by Freedom's configuration and operating conditions

DSHOP: Distributed simple hierarchical ordered planner.

Planning has been an important subject in the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for over three decades. Planning is the problem of seeking a series of actions (that is, a plan) that will accomplish a desired goal. Most planning approaches rely on a single processor or a single-agent paradigm. Unfortunately, in a complex world, a single agent may not be sufficient to optimally solve the problem. Distributed Planning is a sub-field of Distributed AI that involves multi-agents working together to solve large planning problems. Distribution may speed up the traditional planning system through parallelism. Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is an AI planning methodology that creates plans by task decomposition. SHOP (Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner) is a domain-independent HTN planning system designed by Dana Nau et al. that plans for tasks in the same order that they will later be executed. This thesis aims at designing and implementing a distributed version of SHOP (that is, DSHOP) and running it on a high performance distributed system called SHARCNET. The implementation is based upon Message Passing Interface (MPI), that is, a library of functions used to achieve parallelism via message-passing. We investigate two approaches to share work between processors: state-copying and state-recomputation. We implemented a state-copying based DSHOP system (DSHOPC), and a state-recomputation based DSHOP system (DSHOPR). We compared these two implementations of DSHOP with the Java version of SHOP on a set of randomly generated artificial domains. A set of experimental results has been used to evaluate the performance of the DSHOP algorithm.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .L83. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-01, page: 0240. Advisers: Scott Goodwin; Froduald Kabanza. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change

This handbook provides the growing number of people who are developing networks for social change with practical advice based on the experiences of network builders, case studies of networks small and large, local and international, and emerging scientific knowledge about "connectivity." It is intended to join, complement, and spur other efforts to capture and make widely available what is being learned in the business, government, and civil sectors about why and how to use networks, rather than solitary organizations, to generate large-scale impact