An intelligent object paradigm for monitoring and control of mobile-enterprises

Abstract

In today's business world, the senior manager often has to travel widely representing the enterprise at major negotiations with their suppliers or customers on pricing and delivery time while keeping watch of his company. The Mobile-Enterprise concept has emerged as an innovation with the increasing use of PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) on wireless data networks. To fully realize the concept, simply allowing the use of PDA to search for information is incomplete. It has to be complemented with an intelligent paradigm to deal with the request for information as well as command execution. This study proposes a Mobile-enterprise Multi-Agent Paradigm (MMAP) which is an agent-based intelligent solution provider developed for SMEs (Small to Medium Enterprises) to allow effective remote enquiry of business information and to exercise control in the factory/company. The paradigm consists of two modules, namely, Real-Time Data Warehouse (RTDW), and Query and Control Multi-agent Module (QCMM). RTDW is responsible for manipulating various real-time data within the enterprise using technologies of data warehouse and OLAP. QCMM is the core module of MMAP, the framework of which is developed by multi-agent technology. The module comprises three kinds of agents to provide optimized decision support for query and control request from the end users. Furthermore, MMAP is driven by intelligent task oriented software agents where the distribution of intelligence is optimized by providing an optimum solution to a nonlinear 0-1 programming model through a scatter search approach. Its objective is to maximize the total completion rate of obtained information for a given task set. An illustration of the proposed model's application in an electronic appliance manufacturing enterprise is presented. The main contributions in this study will include three aspects. First, a conceptual framework is established to support the development and validation of the Mobile-Enterprise. Secondly, the relevant agent architectures are proposed to carry out the intelligent operations of the system. Thirdly, a scatter search approach is developed to solve optimization problem for MMAP.