Intelligent Agent-Based Operations Management

An intelligent agent is a piece of software that represents one or more (functional or physical) components within a production system, which can plan its own actions and co-ordinate them with others. This book describes the range of application of these systems to practical industrial problems. These include the use, in product modelling, of a concurrent engineering approach in new product development, the formalization of knowledge and product information in intelligent systems, and the classification of configuration modelling requirements for industrial product through generic modelling and configuration. In process modelling, information and knowledge management is applied to the building construction industry, whereas in organization modelling it is applied to the management and control of distributed systems, real-time distributed control systems and scheduling problems.