A Multi-Agent Approach Towards Collaborative Supply Chain Management

Supply chain collaboration has become a critical success factor for supply chain management and effectively improves the performance of organizations in various industries. Supply chain collaboration builds on information sharing, collaborative planning and execution. Information technology is an important enabler of collaborative supply chain management. Many information systems have been developed for supply chain management from legacy systems and enterprise resource planning (ERP) into the newly developed advanced planning and scheduling system (APS) and e-commerce solutions. However, these systems do not provide sufficient support to achieve collaborative supply chain. Recently, intelligent agent technology and multi-agent system (MAS) have received a great potential in supporting transparency in information flows of business networks and modeling of the dynamic supply chain for collaborative supply chain planning and execution. This paper explores the similarities between multi-agent system and supply chain system to justify the use of multi-agent technology as an appropriate approach to support supply chain collaboration. In addition, the framework of the multi-agent-based collaborative supply chain management system will be presented

An Exploratory Study of Personal Reflection and Collaboration Skills using Online Collaborative Tool in Project-Based Learning

By deepening our understanding of the use of Web 2.0 for reflective practice, knowledge co-construction and project based learning this paper aims to contribute to our understanding of collaborative learning. The paper investigates a case study of a post-graduate system development subject to increase student learning through the development of students’ personal reflection and collaboration skills. The project aims to develop key foundational knowledge and skills identified in the IS 2010 curriculum guidelines, i.e. the ability to work collaboratively. Of particular interest was the ability of student collaboration combined with personal reflective learning to lead to negotiation of meaning and co-construction of knowledge. A case study approach was used to investigate the use Web 2.0 tools of wikis and blogs to facilitate online collaborative project development. Our result shows that individual learning experience can influence contribution made to team project

Relieving the Overloaded Help Desk: A Knowledge Management Approach

The establishment of an organizational help desk (HD) is to provide technical support to users when they encounter technical problems related to hardware, software and network connections. Due to the lack of resources, users often have to wait for a considerably long time before their enquiries and problems are answered and solved. This paper discusses the background of HD and its existing challenges. The application of Knowledge Management (KM) techniques and Knowledge Management System (KMS) enables HD to manage its knowledge effectively. In addition, the combination is capable of relieving the overloaded HD by shifting some of the troubleshooting responsibilities to users

A Hueristic Learning Algorithm for Traveling Salesman Problems

This paper describes the development of a heuristic learning algorithm to solve traveling salesman problems. The heuristic evaluation function of this algorithm considers both local and global estimated distance information. The heuristic learning mechanism allows the algorithm to update the heuristic estimates of visited states and hence modify the tour configuration along the search process. The search engine of the algorithm incorporates Delaunay Triangulations as part of the search strategy to identify candidate edges during the search process

Developing ontology revision framework: A case study on the use of the coherence theory for semantic shopping mall

Why is ontology revision important? Very often, ontology exists in a particular period of timeline is often designed based on the purpose of a domain of interest at that instance of time. However over time, ontology needs to be revised due to changes in content, environment, requirements, or even structural representation. As a result, revision and updating of necessary components in the pre-defined ontology is unavoidable. When this happens, it is important to ensure that revision is conducted in a consistent manner so that it does not result in unforseen redundancies and inconsistencies. Any revision performed must be accompanied by a rational change to be dealt with from the consistency perspective. This paper presents an ontology revision approach to achieve this aim based on the coherence theory model of belief revision theory. An application scenario of semantic shopping mall is used to demonstrate the approach

A Conceptual Model for the Application of Business Analytics in the Horizontal Strategic Alliance

The formation of strategic alliances amongst organisations has grown in recent years as globalisation has opened new markets for firms to pursue. It is of ever-increasing importance that organisations have a thorough understanding of the performance of their alliance to achieve competitive advantage. However, much research on strategic alliance has focused on examining the organisations within the alliance rather than focusing on the alliance itself. Using the new discipline of business analytics, this paper proposes a hierarchical model blending the functional roles of business analytics with data standardisation and context mediation frameworks to allow business analytics to be applied to horizontal strategic alliances with the aim of producing valid, alliance-wide strategic options. A proof of concept whereby the proposed model is theoretically applied to a real-life alliance in the airline industry is given, demonstrating how the model generates insight at the alliance level at each of the model\u27s five levels

Opportunities And Impacts Of Additive Manufacturing: A Literature Review

Additive manufacturing industry has experienced tremendous growth in the last decade. This paper aims to address the lack of insights and systematic research by investigating opportunity and impact of potential economic benefits of AM. Our results show that the number of publications in the AM research has increased exponentially since 2009. The papers have been identified into five themes: applications, country, opportunity, economics and social. Our results show that there are an increasing number of papers that investigate economic and social benefits of AM

An Ontology-based Collaborative Knowledge Management Network to Enhance the Reusability of Inter-organizational Knowledge

A number of knowledge management (KM) approaches based on individual organizational KM strategies and business requirements have been developed without taking system interoperation into consideration. In this paper, a collaborative inter-organizational KM network is proposed to allow various organizations to access and retrieve inter-organizational knowledge. While knowledge engineers can reuse the inter-organizational knowledge to create and evaluate its own organizational knowledge, general users benefit from the effectiveness and efficiency of searching for relevant inter-organizational knowledge within the networ