A Multi-Agent Intelligent Conceptual Framework For Modeling Enterprise Resource Planning.

Manufacturing enterprises are now moving towards open architectures for integrating their activities with those of their suppliers and customers within wide supply chain networks. Traditional knowledge engineering approaches with large scale or very large scale knowledge bases are not suited for such widely distributed systems. Agent-based technology provides a natural way for resolving this problem. This paper presents a multi agent intelligent architecture for modeling manufacturing enterprises so as to integrate design, planning, scheduling, simulation, execution, material supply, and marketing services into a distributed intelligent open environment. This paper proposes a multi-agent intelligent enterprise resource planning (MAIERP) system that uses the characteristics and capabilities of software agents to achieve enterprise wide integration. A software agent is a self-contained, autonomous software unit that performs assigned tasks from the human user and interacts/communicates with other applications and other software agents in different platforms to complete the tasks. Four types of intelligent software agents (interface agents, coordinating agents, planning agents, executions agents) are examined and argued in the proposed MAIERP system architecture. We demonstrate how the proposed MAIERP system takes advantage of existing information systems among various functional areas to achieve the system integration of available enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, while avoiding numerous problems encountered during a typical ERP implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]