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The working group Agent.Enterprise (former special interest group "Manufacturing Logistics" of the German priority research program SPP 1083 "Intelligent Agents in Real-World Business Applications") deals with realistic application scenarios from the area of manufacturing planning, production control, and supply chain management. Within these scenarios, the potential improvements of application of intelligent software agent technology are analysed and evaluated. Thus, the working group decided to develop an open testbed for agent technology in the manufacturing domain designed to be applied to complex manufacturing supply chains, called Agent.Enterprise. This testbed is currently under development in co-operation with the agent technology working group. Aim of the testbed is to allow for comparative experiments of different research approaches and industrially applied solutions within a common scenario.
For this, a multi-multi-agent systems (MMAS) is used. The MMAS incorporates three types of MAS: one for supply-chain-wide planning of orders (SCP-role), one specialized for intra-organizational production planning and scheduling (supplier-role) and one for supply chain tracking (SCT-role) that is responsible for supply chain event management. The application scenario is a multi-level industrial supply chain for production of agricultural machines. Nevertheless, the basic concepts and underlying architecture of the testbed prototype may be applied to other similar scenarios of complex supply chains in the manufacturing domain. Each enterprise in the supply chain is represented by one SCP-Agent, one gateway agent to the internal production planning MAS playing the supplier-role and one agent of the SCT-MAS. Interaction among all MAS is visualized within a portal-website that provides the opportunity to initiate new experiments (e.g. placement of new orders) and reset the simulation. Each participating MAS is visualized separately in the context of the whole supply chain. The technical management of the MMAS is done using ASCML (Agent Software Configurator Manager and Launcher).
A typical workflow of an order within Agent.Enterprise starts with supply-chain-wide planning activities that integrate local production planning. After an initial schedule of orders is identified, this plan is executed. During fulfilment disruptive events are encountered at different levels of the supply chain and are detected by the SCT-MAS. As the disruptive events delay production, replanning activities are triggered by the SCT-Agents that are conducted by the enterprise-specific instances of the SCP-MAS. Only if local replanning is not successful a complete replanning on supply chain level is initiated.
The references provide further information on the Agent.Enterprise MMAS [1] and the underlying development process [2].
[1] D. Frey, T. Stockheim, P.-O. Woelk, and R. Zimmermann. Integrated Multi-agent-based Supply Chain Management 1st International Workshop on Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration (ACEC 2003). Linz, Austria, June 2003.
[2] T. Stockheim, J. Nimis, Th. Scholz, and M. Stehli. How to Build Multi-Multi-Agent Systems: the Agent.Enterprise Approach 6th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2004). Porto, Portugal, April 2004.
In case of any questions concerning Agent.Enterprise, do not hesitate to contact us. Write an e-mail to info <at> agententerprise.net for questions concerning the working group and the scenario itself. In case of technical issues (e.g. if you encounter problems with this site or the Agent.Enterprise NetDemo), please contact admin <at> agententerprise.net.
Note: Don't forget to replace the characters <at> by a @ in your e-mail program.
Prof. Dr. Berend Denkena
Holger Rudzio, Leif-Erik Lorenzen
Prof. Dr. Otthein Herzog
Thorsten Scholz
Prof. Dr. Peter Lockemann
Jens Nimis
Prof. Dr. Freimut Bodendorf
Roland Zimmermann, Stefan Winkler
Prof. Dr. Günther Görz
Bernhard Schiemann
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang König
Tim Stockheim
Working group co-ordinator:
Holger Rudzio (since August 4th, 2005)
Peer-Oliver Woelk (until August 3rd, 2005)
The implementation activities of the Agent.Enterprise NetDemo testbed are carried out in close co-operation with the working group "Technology" of the research program.
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