Supporting knowledge management infrastructure : a multi-agent approach

Knowledge management has by now exerted a large influence over industrial practice. We propose a multi-agent based system to provide infrastructure service to meet various requirements of knowledge management in view of the complex nature of the task, i.e., covering science and technologies across different disciplines. The paper discusses the use of a multi-agent system to support the knowledge management infrastructure. It will also discuss the design rational and implementation details as well as an application to the problem of feature extraction in weather prediction.

Multi-agent based supply chain management with dynamic reconfiguration capability

Supply chain management (SCM) has received increased attention in a globally challenging environment as companies face the necessity to improve customer service and maximize profit. Therefore, dynamic reconfiguration capability is vital for supply chain management to respond to changing customer requirements and operating environments. On the other hand, for its flexible and autonomous characteristics, multi-agent systems are a viable technology for SCM, and have been widely applied in SCM. To this end, dynamic reconfiguration in agent-based SCM systems is proposed from autonomy oriented computing point of view. The performance of agent-based SCM with dynamic reconfiguration is evaluated under a modified TAC SCM scenario. With a dynamic reconfigurable SCM system, new products and processes can be introduced with considerably less expense and ramp-up time.