- Email: [email protected]
Decision support systems in the electronic commerce model development
Copyright @ IFAC Manufacturing. Modeling. Management and Control. Patras. Greece. 2000
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN THE ELECTRONIC COMMERCE MODEL DEVELOPMENT Wen-Yau Liang*, Chun-Cbe Huang**
*Depanment of Information Management. Da Yeh University. Changhua. Taiwan 515 **Laboratory ofIntelligent Systems & Information Management. Depanment of Information Management. National Chi-Nan University. Nan-Tau. Taiwan 545
Abstract : Decision support system (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system, which helps decision makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured managerial problems, such as problems of design processes. Business is undergoing a major paradigm shift, moving from traditional management into a world of agile organizations and processes. Agile corporations have been seeking to develop a number of information technology (IT) systems to assist with decision making of on-line business processes. To assure the electronic commerce's widespread use, its design process problem must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents agilely and based on object-oriented design. Solution approacbes to quickly supporting decision making to design processes are crucial in the electronic commerce's management In this paper, an agent-based framework using an object-oriented approach in the creation of an electronic commerce model is presented. The approach supports solutions to the decision makers who are geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms. It is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of design processes can be solved with the same agent-based framework. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world case that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model, and particularly the shipping object is described. Copyright @2000 IFA C Keywords: Decision support systems, Electronic commerce, Intelligent agent, Object-oriented.
across a large company is a complex and time consuming process. Furthermore, the tremendous growth of the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web (WWW), has led to a critical mass of consumers and finns participating in a global on-line marketplace. For this reason. corporations have been seeking to develop a number of information technology (IT) systems to assist with various management aspects of the on-line business processes. Such electronic commerce (e-commerce) systems aim to improve the way that information is gathered, to managed, distributed, and presented decision-makers in key business functions and operations. Solution approaches to quickly supporting decision making are crucial and may support solutions to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms.
I.INTRODUCIlON Decision support system (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system, which helps decision makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured problems such as problems of design processes (Scott-Morten. 1971). Managerial decision making is synonymous with the whole process of management such as planning, modeling, and controlling. All managerial activities revolve around decision making (Simon. 1977). Current business is undergoing a major paradigm shift, moving from traditional management into a world of agile organizations and processes (Kidd, 1994). An agile corporation should be able to rapidly respond to market changes. Ideally, all relevant information to make informed decisions should be brought together before a judgement is exercised. However obtaining pertinent, consistent and up-to-date information
The notion of an intelligent agent (lA) is one of the
49
most important concepts to emerge in IT systems in the 1990s, as Guilfoyle (1995) noted:
should have a certain way to handle in coding or computing.
"in IO years time most new IT development wi// be affected. and many business processes wi// contain embedded inte/ligent agent-based systems and use the Internet (or the WWW) ".
When taken together, this set of feature requirements leaves agents as the strongest solution candidate - (i) distributed object systems have the necessary encapsulation, but not the sophisticated reasoning required for social interaction or proactive behavior; and (ii) distributed processing systems deal with the distributed aspect of the domain but not with the autonomous nature of the components. The ECMDP problem must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents. (Note that the success of an electronic commerce model not only needs to consider the technology issues, but business strategy issues. This paper focuses on the first one.).
Intelligent agents are viewed as "software components and/or hardware which are capable of acting exactingly to accomplish tasks on behalf of its user and learn as they react and/or interact with their external environment" (Nwana, 1996). The potential of agent technology has been hailed in a 1994 report by Ovum, an UK-based market research company, titled "Intelligent agents: the new evolution in software" (Ovum, 1994). Some agent applications include: Electronic commerce, decision support, business process management, network management, and so on (Jennings, 1995; Jennings, et aI., I 996c; Muller, et aL, 1996). Agent technology looks set to radically alter not only the way in which computers are interacted, but also the way complex systems are conceptualized and built. The choice of agents as a solution technology was motivated by the following observations (Jennings, et aL, 1996): • The domain involves an inherent distribution of data, problem solving capabilities, and responsibilities • The integrity of the existing organizational structure and the autonomy of its sub-parts must be maintained • Interactions are fairly sophisticated, including negotiation, information sharing, and coordination • The problem solution cannot be prescribed entirely from start to finish
Paramount among the challenges of future DSS for the ECMDP is the development and delivery of decision support technologies that are agile and portable to ever changing decision situations (Bui, 1997). One pronusmg approach is that of object-oriented design through the World Wide Web (WWW): "Object-oriented design is a method of design encompassing the process of object-oriented decomposition and a notion for depicting both logical and physical as we/l as static and dynamic models of the system under design" (Booch, 1994). The main potential advantages of such an approach are - (i) computability, in that a design process model obtained is not just a descriptive model but a computable model, (ii) reusability, in that once a design object has been established, it can be used repeatedly, and (iii) exchangeability, in that objects with similar interfaces can be readily exchanged in a modular manner (Liang and O'Grady, 1998).
Electronic commerce is a general term applied to the use of computer and telecommunications technologies, particularly on an inter-enterprise basis, to support trading in objects, e.g., information, goods and services. Zwass(1998} defined E-commerce as "the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks". The design process in the e-commerce considers five functions: Planning, produce, distribute, display, and acquire of objects. In essence, to assure its widespread use, the e-commerce model design process (ECMDP) needs some features (O 'Grady, 1998): • The process is essentially one of non-hierarchical control in character. • The process is highly decentralized with each element of process operating quasi-independently. • The process is also self-managing to some extent that each element of process can adjust dynamically. • The process is also scaleable in that we can continue to add element of process to the network without changing its essentially characteristics. • The process is efficient in that the element of model
The remainder of this paper describes the work undertaken to conceptualize design processes with a collection of intelligent agents using the object-oriented approach. This paper aims to address the resulting research issue:
"How can design process be carried out to meet a customer s requirements using objects that come from suppliers that are geographica/ly separated and operate on differing computer platforms? " The Internet and Electronic Commerce is introduced in Section 2. An intelligent agent framework is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes the object-oriented approach applied in the ECMDP and illustrates the approach with an example. Section 5 concludes the paper. This approach is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of ECMDP problems can be solved with the same agent-based framework. It aims at quickly decision making in the ECMDP, and supports the solutions through the World Wide Web (WWW) to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and
50
operate on differing computer platfonns.
distance from the customers and so one effect may be that customers seek out suppliers that are better performers even if they are some distance away. From the suppliers viewpoint, one effect may be that the better suppliers increase their market share as they can now supply to a much larger constituency.
2.THE INTERNET AND ELECTRONIC COMMERCE The Internet is a collection of computers that communicate using a standard set of protocols. Since there are now millions of computers involved in the Internet, it has grown to be a major means of communication and allows for users to interact with little regard to distance or location. The WWW, is a very large collection of clients and servers that support the HTTP on the Internet. This is an open standard and is implemented on a wide variety of platfonns. The operation of the WWW can be thought ofas being divided into two portions: c1ientslbrowsers on one side and servers on the other. The client / browser -server model describes communication between service consumers (clients) and service providers (servers). This model allows for processes at different sites and on different computer systems to exchange messages interactively. The Internet has experienced a very rapid growth in popularity in terms of the number of sites that are connected to the Internet, the number of users and in the amount of data that is sent over the Internet. The precise growth figures can be surprisingly difficult to obtain. The figures would suggest that there has been a very rapid growth in the number of registered domains, with an increasing exponential growth-taking place (Gilder, 1998). The growth in the amount of data traveling through the central Internet backbone is almost perfect exponential nature (Guilfoyle, 1995). The rate of growth is such that the amount of data is doubling every three-four months and. at present, this shows no sign of subsiding. The implication of this is that communications capacities will be substantial greater a few years from now and much work is underway in anticipating this substantial growth ID communications capacities. One vision of an Internet household of the future would be where there would be an Internet connection (with the capacity of a flber optic cable) to the house, with the household containing multiple machines that are Internet compatible including TVs, radios, cameras, phones, videophones, and computers. Consumers would therefore be able to have much more flexibility in their TV viewing and shopping. Another vision for a commercial company is of much of the business being conducted via Internet connections both within the company but also with suppliers and customers. All company activities would be carried out using Internet technologies (with much of it removed from the public Internet by being on corporate Intranets) including requests for bids, proposals, purchasing, customer ordering, financial accounting, scheduling and production plartning and control. Communications within corporation and with suppliers/customers will be substantially improved and one effect will be the shrinking of distance. It may no longer be substantial disadvantage to be some
3.INTELLIGENT AGENT FRAMEWORK
In this section, an agent-based framework called an intelligent object-oriented agent (IOOA) system is described. IOOA researches both the technology and the methods that are needed to improve the way object information is gathered, managed. distributed and utilized to decision-makers in key e-commerce business functions and operations (Alty, et aI., 1994). The system characteristics: • Intelligent: The agent automatically customizes itself to the preferences of its customer (or client), based on previous experience and imprecise information from interaction with customers. The agent also automatically adapts to changes in its environment. • Autonomous: An agent is able to take the initiative and exercise a non-trivial degree of control over its own actions through service agreements. • Cooperation: An agent does not blindly obey commands, but makes suggestions to modify requests or ask clarification questions. It also cooperates with other agents to query the modules needed.
3.1 Intelligent Object-Oriented Agent System In the lOOA system, each IOOA is able to perform one or more services (Figure 1). A service corresponds to some problem solving activities of object combination. The simplest service (called a object combination job) represents a problem solving atomic activity endeavor in the IOOA system, e.g., combining two objects into a higher level object. These atomic activities can be combined to form complex services, e.g., creation of a PC including a terminal, a motherboard, a keyboard objects, etc., by adding ordering constraints (e.g. two tasks can run in parallel, must run in parallel, or must run in sequence). The nesting of services can be arbitrarily complex and at the topmost level the entire business process ultimately can be viewed as a service.Service requirements are issued either from other department, e.g., market teams through an Intranet, or from external customers through the Internet.
51
databases and object combination jobs, but also other IOOAs. The latter case allows a nested (hierarchical) agent system to be constructed in which higher-level
Fig.2. The IOOA Architecture(Jennings, et aI. , 1996)
Fig.!. The environment of the IOOA system
agents realize their functionality through lower level agents (the lower level agents have the same structure as the higher level agents and, can, therefore, have sub-agents as well as object combination jobs in their agency). For example, the higher level agent may represent a design department whose work is carried out by a number of design teams (the lower level agents). This structure enables flat, hierarchical, and hybrid organizations to be mode led in a single framework.
Services are associated with one or more agents that are responsible for the management and execution of those services. Each service is managed by one agent, although the execution of it's sub-services may Involve a number of other agents. Since agents are autonomous, there are no control dependencies between them. Therefore, if an agent requires a service, which is managed by another agent, it cannot simply instruct that agent to start the service. Rather, the agents must come to a mutually acceptable agreement about the tenns and conditions under which the desired service will be performed. The mechanism for making agreements is negotiation - a joint decision making process in which the parties verbalize their (possibly contradictory) demands and then move towards agreement by a process of concession or search for new alternatives.
The IOOA plays four roles in the e-commerce model design processes: A scheduler is an agent that schedules the object combination operations and responsible for assessing and monitoring the agent's ability to meet: (i) The customer agreement that is already agreed upon and (ii) the potential customer agreement that it may agree to in the future. This involves two main roles: scheduling and exception handling. The former involves maintaining a record of the availability of the agent's resources, which can then be used to determine whether customer agreement can be met or new customer agreement can be accepted. The exception handler receives exception reports from the optimizer during service execution (e.g. "service may fail", "service has failed", or "no customer agreement in place") and decides upon the appropriate response. For example, if a service is delayed then the scheduler may decide to locally reschedule it, to renegotiate its customer agreement, or to terminate it altogether.
3.2 Architecture ofan IOOA
The activities of the agents involve: • Selecting objects to satisfy the requirements of customers • Combining the objects into an integrated service • Coordinating and scheduling the processes intelligently. All IOOAs have the same basic architecture (Figure 2). This involves an agent body that is responsible for managing the agent's activities and interacting with peers and an agency that represents the solution resources for the problems of e-commerce design processes. The body has a number of functional components responsible for each of it's main activities - scheduling object combination operations, searching desired objects, optimizing object combination, and managing the object databases. This internal architecture is broadly based on the GRATE (Jennings, et ai., 1996b) and ARCHON (Jennings, et ai., 1996a) agent models. The domain resources include not only object
An optimizer is an agent that opturuzes the object combination based upon the requirements from customers and engineering constraints (Kusiak and Huang, 1997). Three main roles involve: service execution management (optimizing executed services as specified by the agent's customer agreements), solution presentation (routing
52
solutions between servers, clients and other agents), and exception handling (monitor the execution of jobs and services for unexpected events and then react appropriately). A manager is an agent that (i) maintains the object database where object information is stored (ii) delivers the status messages of active services between optimizer and the clients, between an agent and its agency, and between peer agents (iii) communicates • between the optimizer and clients within the agency relating to job management activities (e.g. activate, suspend. or resume a job), and • between agents within that agency or peer agents relating to service execution management (e.g. an instruction to start service, service finished, service results).
WAlS
Fig.3. A view of how an explorer works An explorer is an agent that searches the objects that are located in other distributed databases and performs the role of managing, querying or collating object information from many distributed sources. It is able to traverse the WWW, gather information and report what it retrieves to a home location. Figure 3 depicts how the typical static explorer works.
where has a number of web server and client platforms including Netscape Fasttrack servers and Microsoft Internet Information Servers, each of which run on either Windows NT or 95 operating systems. The objective of the system is to develop a shopping web site using Commerce Site Server, which includes pipeline COM component and each component can be easily updated and replaced using proposed approach. First, in IOOA system, IOOA starts to perform service corresponds to some problem solving activities of object combination. This service called an object combination job represents a problem solving atomic activity endeavor in the IOOA system by invoking the design process outlined above. In this case, combining several objects (software component) into an electronic commerce model. We will take a close look at one of component shipping component, which calculates the shipping cost from data stored in a relational database. The component took as input the to and from zip codes, the weight of the package, shipping type (Next day, etc.) and any other data required by the shipping companies to calculate the cost. As shown in Figure 4, The implementation of a variety of shipping modes in the shipping phase of the site server pipeline. These include UPS and FedEx options (including next day, 2nd day, surface etc.) that use the zip code, weight (in the orderfonnlDictionaries) and customer shipping mode preference to extract the cost from the SQL database. And the presentation to electronic customers of the costs of each of the shipping modes so that customers can see the impact of their decisions
_. -
4.AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACH IN THE CREATION OF AN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE MODEL
lUll
o. ~~n?~ Fo::&:P1lOf1lJ'~
s...t~=~~
In this section, an object-oriented (00), Design with Objects (DwO) approach (Liang and O'Grady, 1998) is used in the agent body that solves the problems of e-commerce design process. The 00 approach is implemented in the IOOA package. Decision-makers or clients use the browsers to input the requirements and run the IOOA package through the World Wide Web (WWW) regardless of what platforms are used. The WWW is potentially useful for remote decision making since it allows the disparate functions that are involved in remote decision making to share data relatively easily. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world case that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model, and particularly the shipping object is described. The prototype system was carried out using a test-bed in the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems & Information Management,
City
.tmaa us: Po\l
po\
00-,.. f1'...... ROe.
Fig.4. The operation of CO M component
5. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS This paper has introduced the Internet and Electronic Commerce. The lA framework that characters it's intelligent, autonomous, and cooperation, has been presented. The object-oriented approach used by the IOOA has been described, which aims to obtain the
53
necessary insights to develop design process models and acts as the base for improving or for computerization of the process. The implementation of the shipping case study would indicate that the IOOA system is a computable model with reusable objects and that it allows for the ready exchange of objects, although care should be exercised in extrapolating from a particular example to the general case. This approach is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of ECMDP problems can be solved with the same agent-based framework. It aims at quickly decision making in the ECMDP, and supports the solutions through the World Wide Web (WWW) to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms.
(1996a). Using ARCHON to Develop Real-Word DAI Applications for Electricity Transportation Management and Particle Acceleator Control.IEEE Expert 6 (5), pp.64-70. Jennings, N. R., P. Faratin, M. J. Johnson, P. O'Brien, and M. E. Wiegand (1996b). Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes. Proceedings of the First International Conference on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, London, UK, pp.345-360. Jennings, N. R., Nick and M. Wooldridge(1996c). Software Agents, lEE review, 42 (I), pp. 17-20. Kidd, P. T.(l994). Agile Manufacturing: Forging New Frontiers. Addison Wesley, New York. Kosoresow, A. P. (1993). On the Efficiency of Agents Based Systems, Proceedings of intelligent Autonomous Systems Ill, Groen, Hirose, and Thore ed, pp. 551-560. Kusiak, A. and Chun-Che Huang (1997). Design of Modular Digital Circuits for Testability. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology - Part C, 20 (1) pp.48-57. Liang, W. Y. and P. O'Grady (1998). Design with Objects: An Approach to Object-Oriented Design. Computer Aided Design, 30 (12), pp. 943 -956. Muller, Jorg P., M. J. Wooldrigde, and N. R. Jennings( 1996). Proceedings of Intelligent Agent Ill: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ECAI '96 Workshop (A TAL). Budapest, Hungry. Nwana, H. S.(1996). Software agents: An Overview. Knowledge Engineering Review, II (3), pp. 205-244. O'Grady, P.(1998). The Internet, Intranets and Extranets for Operations and Manufacturing, Class Notes. University of Iowa. Ovumm (1994). Intelligent Agents: The New Revolution in Software. Ovum Report. Scott-Morton, M. S.( 1971). Management Decision System: Computer Based Support for Decision Making. Division of Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Simon, H.(1977). The New Science of Management Decision . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ . Zwass, V. (1998) Strocture and Macro-Level Impacts of Electronic Commerce: from Technological Infrastructure to Electronic Marketplaces, in: E. Kenneth, Kendall eds., Emerging Information Technologies. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
The following issues require further study: 1. Involvement of a "virtual agency model" that reflects the principle of Concurrent Engineering, whereby agents from different parts of a logical organization may cooperate in the provision of some specific fuzzy service(Alty, et al., 1994). 2. Extension and more rigorous specifications used in negotiation: There are few evaluative studies of negotiation, and most of these focus on the effects of different negotiation strategies upon the agent society (Kosoresow, 1993). 3. Expansion to other business processes other than product development. 4. The implementation described uses the Internet as a vehicle but the proposed approach should also be applicable to any other computer network. And needs to be further investigated.
6.REFERENCES Alty, J. L., D. Griffiths, N. R. Jennings, E. H. Mamdani, A. Struthers, and M. E. Wiegand (1994). ADEPT-Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks: Overview and Architecture. Proceedings of the BCS Expert Systems Conference. Applications Track, Cambridge, UK, pp.359-371. Booch, G. (1994). Object Oriented Design with Applications. Benjamin, Cummings. Bui, T. X . (1997). Decision Support in the Future Tense. Decision Support Systems, 19 (2), pp. 149150. Gilder, G. (1997). Technology Report 2 (2). Gilder, G. (1998). Technology Report 3 (3). Guilfoyle, C.(1995). Ventors of Agent Technology. UNICOM Seminar on Intelligent Agents and their Business Application. 8-9-November, London, pp. 135-142. Jennings, N. R. (1995). Controlling Cooperative Problem Solving in Industrial Multi-Agent Systems Using Joint Intentions. Artificial Intelligence, 75 (2), pp.195-240. Jennings, N. R., J. Corera, 1. Laresgoiti, E. H. Mamdani, F. Perriolat, P. Skarek, and L. Z. Varga
54
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN THE ELECTRONIC COMMERCE MODEL DEVELOPMENT Wen-Yau Liang*, Chun-Cbe Huang**
*Depanment of Information Management. Da Yeh University. Changhua. Taiwan 515 **Laboratory ofIntelligent Systems & Information Management. Depanment of Information Management. National Chi-Nan University. Nan-Tau. Taiwan 545
Abstract : Decision support system (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system, which helps decision makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured managerial problems, such as problems of design processes. Business is undergoing a major paradigm shift, moving from traditional management into a world of agile organizations and processes. Agile corporations have been seeking to develop a number of information technology (IT) systems to assist with decision making of on-line business processes. To assure the electronic commerce's widespread use, its design process problem must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents agilely and based on object-oriented design. Solution approacbes to quickly supporting decision making to design processes are crucial in the electronic commerce's management In this paper, an agent-based framework using an object-oriented approach in the creation of an electronic commerce model is presented. The approach supports solutions to the decision makers who are geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms. It is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of design processes can be solved with the same agent-based framework. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world case that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model, and particularly the shipping object is described. Copyright @2000 IFA C Keywords: Decision support systems, Electronic commerce, Intelligent agent, Object-oriented.
across a large company is a complex and time consuming process. Furthermore, the tremendous growth of the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web (WWW), has led to a critical mass of consumers and finns participating in a global on-line marketplace. For this reason. corporations have been seeking to develop a number of information technology (IT) systems to assist with various management aspects of the on-line business processes. Such electronic commerce (e-commerce) systems aim to improve the way that information is gathered, to managed, distributed, and presented decision-makers in key business functions and operations. Solution approaches to quickly supporting decision making are crucial and may support solutions to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms.
I.INTRODUCIlON Decision support system (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system, which helps decision makers utilize data and models to solve unstructured problems such as problems of design processes (Scott-Morten. 1971). Managerial decision making is synonymous with the whole process of management such as planning, modeling, and controlling. All managerial activities revolve around decision making (Simon. 1977). Current business is undergoing a major paradigm shift, moving from traditional management into a world of agile organizations and processes (Kidd, 1994). An agile corporation should be able to rapidly respond to market changes. Ideally, all relevant information to make informed decisions should be brought together before a judgement is exercised. However obtaining pertinent, consistent and up-to-date information
The notion of an intelligent agent (lA) is one of the
49
most important concepts to emerge in IT systems in the 1990s, as Guilfoyle (1995) noted:
should have a certain way to handle in coding or computing.
"in IO years time most new IT development wi// be affected. and many business processes wi// contain embedded inte/ligent agent-based systems and use the Internet (or the WWW) ".
When taken together, this set of feature requirements leaves agents as the strongest solution candidate - (i) distributed object systems have the necessary encapsulation, but not the sophisticated reasoning required for social interaction or proactive behavior; and (ii) distributed processing systems deal with the distributed aspect of the domain but not with the autonomous nature of the components. The ECMDP problem must be addressed by a team of specialists or intelligent agents. (Note that the success of an electronic commerce model not only needs to consider the technology issues, but business strategy issues. This paper focuses on the first one.).
Intelligent agents are viewed as "software components and/or hardware which are capable of acting exactingly to accomplish tasks on behalf of its user and learn as they react and/or interact with their external environment" (Nwana, 1996). The potential of agent technology has been hailed in a 1994 report by Ovum, an UK-based market research company, titled "Intelligent agents: the new evolution in software" (Ovum, 1994). Some agent applications include: Electronic commerce, decision support, business process management, network management, and so on (Jennings, 1995; Jennings, et aI., I 996c; Muller, et aL, 1996). Agent technology looks set to radically alter not only the way in which computers are interacted, but also the way complex systems are conceptualized and built. The choice of agents as a solution technology was motivated by the following observations (Jennings, et aL, 1996): • The domain involves an inherent distribution of data, problem solving capabilities, and responsibilities • The integrity of the existing organizational structure and the autonomy of its sub-parts must be maintained • Interactions are fairly sophisticated, including negotiation, information sharing, and coordination • The problem solution cannot be prescribed entirely from start to finish
Paramount among the challenges of future DSS for the ECMDP is the development and delivery of decision support technologies that are agile and portable to ever changing decision situations (Bui, 1997). One pronusmg approach is that of object-oriented design through the World Wide Web (WWW): "Object-oriented design is a method of design encompassing the process of object-oriented decomposition and a notion for depicting both logical and physical as we/l as static and dynamic models of the system under design" (Booch, 1994). The main potential advantages of such an approach are - (i) computability, in that a design process model obtained is not just a descriptive model but a computable model, (ii) reusability, in that once a design object has been established, it can be used repeatedly, and (iii) exchangeability, in that objects with similar interfaces can be readily exchanged in a modular manner (Liang and O'Grady, 1998).
Electronic commerce is a general term applied to the use of computer and telecommunications technologies, particularly on an inter-enterprise basis, to support trading in objects, e.g., information, goods and services. Zwass(1998} defined E-commerce as "the sharing of business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks". The design process in the e-commerce considers five functions: Planning, produce, distribute, display, and acquire of objects. In essence, to assure its widespread use, the e-commerce model design process (ECMDP) needs some features (O 'Grady, 1998): • The process is essentially one of non-hierarchical control in character. • The process is highly decentralized with each element of process operating quasi-independently. • The process is also self-managing to some extent that each element of process can adjust dynamically. • The process is also scaleable in that we can continue to add element of process to the network without changing its essentially characteristics. • The process is efficient in that the element of model
The remainder of this paper describes the work undertaken to conceptualize design processes with a collection of intelligent agents using the object-oriented approach. This paper aims to address the resulting research issue:
"How can design process be carried out to meet a customer s requirements using objects that come from suppliers that are geographica/ly separated and operate on differing computer platforms? " The Internet and Electronic Commerce is introduced in Section 2. An intelligent agent framework is presented in Section 3. Section 4 describes the object-oriented approach applied in the ECMDP and illustrates the approach with an example. Section 5 concludes the paper. This approach is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of ECMDP problems can be solved with the same agent-based framework. It aims at quickly decision making in the ECMDP, and supports the solutions through the World Wide Web (WWW) to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and
50
operate on differing computer platfonns.
distance from the customers and so one effect may be that customers seek out suppliers that are better performers even if they are some distance away. From the suppliers viewpoint, one effect may be that the better suppliers increase their market share as they can now supply to a much larger constituency.
2.THE INTERNET AND ELECTRONIC COMMERCE The Internet is a collection of computers that communicate using a standard set of protocols. Since there are now millions of computers involved in the Internet, it has grown to be a major means of communication and allows for users to interact with little regard to distance or location. The WWW, is a very large collection of clients and servers that support the HTTP on the Internet. This is an open standard and is implemented on a wide variety of platfonns. The operation of the WWW can be thought ofas being divided into two portions: c1ientslbrowsers on one side and servers on the other. The client / browser -server model describes communication between service consumers (clients) and service providers (servers). This model allows for processes at different sites and on different computer systems to exchange messages interactively. The Internet has experienced a very rapid growth in popularity in terms of the number of sites that are connected to the Internet, the number of users and in the amount of data that is sent over the Internet. The precise growth figures can be surprisingly difficult to obtain. The figures would suggest that there has been a very rapid growth in the number of registered domains, with an increasing exponential growth-taking place (Gilder, 1998). The growth in the amount of data traveling through the central Internet backbone is almost perfect exponential nature (Guilfoyle, 1995). The rate of growth is such that the amount of data is doubling every three-four months and. at present, this shows no sign of subsiding. The implication of this is that communications capacities will be substantial greater a few years from now and much work is underway in anticipating this substantial growth ID communications capacities. One vision of an Internet household of the future would be where there would be an Internet connection (with the capacity of a flber optic cable) to the house, with the household containing multiple machines that are Internet compatible including TVs, radios, cameras, phones, videophones, and computers. Consumers would therefore be able to have much more flexibility in their TV viewing and shopping. Another vision for a commercial company is of much of the business being conducted via Internet connections both within the company but also with suppliers and customers. All company activities would be carried out using Internet technologies (with much of it removed from the public Internet by being on corporate Intranets) including requests for bids, proposals, purchasing, customer ordering, financial accounting, scheduling and production plartning and control. Communications within corporation and with suppliers/customers will be substantially improved and one effect will be the shrinking of distance. It may no longer be substantial disadvantage to be some
3.INTELLIGENT AGENT FRAMEWORK
In this section, an agent-based framework called an intelligent object-oriented agent (IOOA) system is described. IOOA researches both the technology and the methods that are needed to improve the way object information is gathered, managed. distributed and utilized to decision-makers in key e-commerce business functions and operations (Alty, et aI., 1994). The system characteristics: • Intelligent: The agent automatically customizes itself to the preferences of its customer (or client), based on previous experience and imprecise information from interaction with customers. The agent also automatically adapts to changes in its environment. • Autonomous: An agent is able to take the initiative and exercise a non-trivial degree of control over its own actions through service agreements. • Cooperation: An agent does not blindly obey commands, but makes suggestions to modify requests or ask clarification questions. It also cooperates with other agents to query the modules needed.
3.1 Intelligent Object-Oriented Agent System In the lOOA system, each IOOA is able to perform one or more services (Figure 1). A service corresponds to some problem solving activities of object combination. The simplest service (called a object combination job) represents a problem solving atomic activity endeavor in the IOOA system, e.g., combining two objects into a higher level object. These atomic activities can be combined to form complex services, e.g., creation of a PC including a terminal, a motherboard, a keyboard objects, etc., by adding ordering constraints (e.g. two tasks can run in parallel, must run in parallel, or must run in sequence). The nesting of services can be arbitrarily complex and at the topmost level the entire business process ultimately can be viewed as a service.Service requirements are issued either from other department, e.g., market teams through an Intranet, or from external customers through the Internet.
51
databases and object combination jobs, but also other IOOAs. The latter case allows a nested (hierarchical) agent system to be constructed in which higher-level
Fig.2. The IOOA Architecture(Jennings, et aI. , 1996)
Fig.!. The environment of the IOOA system
agents realize their functionality through lower level agents (the lower level agents have the same structure as the higher level agents and, can, therefore, have sub-agents as well as object combination jobs in their agency). For example, the higher level agent may represent a design department whose work is carried out by a number of design teams (the lower level agents). This structure enables flat, hierarchical, and hybrid organizations to be mode led in a single framework.
Services are associated with one or more agents that are responsible for the management and execution of those services. Each service is managed by one agent, although the execution of it's sub-services may Involve a number of other agents. Since agents are autonomous, there are no control dependencies between them. Therefore, if an agent requires a service, which is managed by another agent, it cannot simply instruct that agent to start the service. Rather, the agents must come to a mutually acceptable agreement about the tenns and conditions under which the desired service will be performed. The mechanism for making agreements is negotiation - a joint decision making process in which the parties verbalize their (possibly contradictory) demands and then move towards agreement by a process of concession or search for new alternatives.
The IOOA plays four roles in the e-commerce model design processes: A scheduler is an agent that schedules the object combination operations and responsible for assessing and monitoring the agent's ability to meet: (i) The customer agreement that is already agreed upon and (ii) the potential customer agreement that it may agree to in the future. This involves two main roles: scheduling and exception handling. The former involves maintaining a record of the availability of the agent's resources, which can then be used to determine whether customer agreement can be met or new customer agreement can be accepted. The exception handler receives exception reports from the optimizer during service execution (e.g. "service may fail", "service has failed", or "no customer agreement in place") and decides upon the appropriate response. For example, if a service is delayed then the scheduler may decide to locally reschedule it, to renegotiate its customer agreement, or to terminate it altogether.
3.2 Architecture ofan IOOA
The activities of the agents involve: • Selecting objects to satisfy the requirements of customers • Combining the objects into an integrated service • Coordinating and scheduling the processes intelligently. All IOOAs have the same basic architecture (Figure 2). This involves an agent body that is responsible for managing the agent's activities and interacting with peers and an agency that represents the solution resources for the problems of e-commerce design processes. The body has a number of functional components responsible for each of it's main activities - scheduling object combination operations, searching desired objects, optimizing object combination, and managing the object databases. This internal architecture is broadly based on the GRATE (Jennings, et ai., 1996b) and ARCHON (Jennings, et ai., 1996a) agent models. The domain resources include not only object
An optimizer is an agent that opturuzes the object combination based upon the requirements from customers and engineering constraints (Kusiak and Huang, 1997). Three main roles involve: service execution management (optimizing executed services as specified by the agent's customer agreements), solution presentation (routing
52
solutions between servers, clients and other agents), and exception handling (monitor the execution of jobs and services for unexpected events and then react appropriately). A manager is an agent that (i) maintains the object database where object information is stored (ii) delivers the status messages of active services between optimizer and the clients, between an agent and its agency, and between peer agents (iii) communicates • between the optimizer and clients within the agency relating to job management activities (e.g. activate, suspend. or resume a job), and • between agents within that agency or peer agents relating to service execution management (e.g. an instruction to start service, service finished, service results).
WAlS
Fig.3. A view of how an explorer works An explorer is an agent that searches the objects that are located in other distributed databases and performs the role of managing, querying or collating object information from many distributed sources. It is able to traverse the WWW, gather information and report what it retrieves to a home location. Figure 3 depicts how the typical static explorer works.
where has a number of web server and client platforms including Netscape Fasttrack servers and Microsoft Internet Information Servers, each of which run on either Windows NT or 95 operating systems. The objective of the system is to develop a shopping web site using Commerce Site Server, which includes pipeline COM component and each component can be easily updated and replaced using proposed approach. First, in IOOA system, IOOA starts to perform service corresponds to some problem solving activities of object combination. This service called an object combination job represents a problem solving atomic activity endeavor in the IOOA system by invoking the design process outlined above. In this case, combining several objects (software component) into an electronic commerce model. We will take a close look at one of component shipping component, which calculates the shipping cost from data stored in a relational database. The component took as input the to and from zip codes, the weight of the package, shipping type (Next day, etc.) and any other data required by the shipping companies to calculate the cost. As shown in Figure 4, The implementation of a variety of shipping modes in the shipping phase of the site server pipeline. These include UPS and FedEx options (including next day, 2nd day, surface etc.) that use the zip code, weight (in the orderfonnlDictionaries) and customer shipping mode preference to extract the cost from the SQL database. And the presentation to electronic customers of the costs of each of the shipping modes so that customers can see the impact of their decisions
_. -
4.AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACH IN THE CREATION OF AN ELECTRONIC COMMERCE MODEL
lUll
o. ~~n?~ Fo::&:P1lOf1lJ'~
s...t~=~~
In this section, an object-oriented (00), Design with Objects (DwO) approach (Liang and O'Grady, 1998) is used in the agent body that solves the problems of e-commerce design process. The 00 approach is implemented in the IOOA package. Decision-makers or clients use the browsers to input the requirements and run the IOOA package through the World Wide Web (WWW) regardless of what platforms are used. The WWW is potentially useful for remote decision making since it allows the disparate functions that are involved in remote decision making to share data relatively easily. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-world case that involves combining objects to complete an electronic commerce model, and particularly the shipping object is described. The prototype system was carried out using a test-bed in the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems & Information Management,
City
.tmaa us: Po\l
po\
00-,.. f1'...... ROe.
Fig.4. The operation of CO M component
5. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS This paper has introduced the Internet and Electronic Commerce. The lA framework that characters it's intelligent, autonomous, and cooperation, has been presented. The object-oriented approach used by the IOOA has been described, which aims to obtain the
53
necessary insights to develop design process models and acts as the base for improving or for computerization of the process. The implementation of the shipping case study would indicate that the IOOA system is a computable model with reusable objects and that it allows for the ready exchange of objects, although care should be exercised in extrapolating from a particular example to the general case. This approach is agile because, by combining various objects, different types of ECMDP problems can be solved with the same agent-based framework. It aims at quickly decision making in the ECMDP, and supports the solutions through the World Wide Web (WWW) to the decision makers who may be geographically separated and operate on differing computer platforms.
(1996a). Using ARCHON to Develop Real-Word DAI Applications for Electricity Transportation Management and Particle Acceleator Control.IEEE Expert 6 (5), pp.64-70. Jennings, N. R., P. Faratin, M. J. Johnson, P. O'Brien, and M. E. Wiegand (1996b). Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes. Proceedings of the First International Conference on The Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology, London, UK, pp.345-360. Jennings, N. R., Nick and M. Wooldridge(1996c). Software Agents, lEE review, 42 (I), pp. 17-20. Kidd, P. T.(l994). Agile Manufacturing: Forging New Frontiers. Addison Wesley, New York. Kosoresow, A. P. (1993). On the Efficiency of Agents Based Systems, Proceedings of intelligent Autonomous Systems Ill, Groen, Hirose, and Thore ed, pp. 551-560. Kusiak, A. and Chun-Che Huang (1997). Design of Modular Digital Circuits for Testability. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology - Part C, 20 (1) pp.48-57. Liang, W. Y. and P. O'Grady (1998). Design with Objects: An Approach to Object-Oriented Design. Computer Aided Design, 30 (12), pp. 943 -956. Muller, Jorg P., M. J. Wooldrigde, and N. R. Jennings( 1996). Proceedings of Intelligent Agent Ill: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ECAI '96 Workshop (A TAL). Budapest, Hungry. Nwana, H. S.(1996). Software agents: An Overview. Knowledge Engineering Review, II (3), pp. 205-244. O'Grady, P.(1998). The Internet, Intranets and Extranets for Operations and Manufacturing, Class Notes. University of Iowa. Ovumm (1994). Intelligent Agents: The New Revolution in Software. Ovum Report. Scott-Morton, M. S.( 1971). Management Decision System: Computer Based Support for Decision Making. Division of Research, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Simon, H.(1977). The New Science of Management Decision . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ . Zwass, V. (1998) Strocture and Macro-Level Impacts of Electronic Commerce: from Technological Infrastructure to Electronic Marketplaces, in: E. Kenneth, Kendall eds., Emerging Information Technologies. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
The following issues require further study: 1. Involvement of a "virtual agency model" that reflects the principle of Concurrent Engineering, whereby agents from different parts of a logical organization may cooperate in the provision of some specific fuzzy service(Alty, et al., 1994). 2. Extension and more rigorous specifications used in negotiation: There are few evaluative studies of negotiation, and most of these focus on the effects of different negotiation strategies upon the agent society (Kosoresow, 1993). 3. Expansion to other business processes other than product development. 4. The implementation described uses the Internet as a vehicle but the proposed approach should also be applicable to any other computer network. And needs to be further investigated.
6.REFERENCES Alty, J. L., D. Griffiths, N. R. Jennings, E. H. Mamdani, A. Struthers, and M. E. Wiegand (1994). ADEPT-Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks: Overview and Architecture. Proceedings of the BCS Expert Systems Conference. Applications Track, Cambridge, UK, pp.359-371. Booch, G. (1994). Object Oriented Design with Applications. Benjamin, Cummings. Bui, T. X . (1997). Decision Support in the Future Tense. Decision Support Systems, 19 (2), pp. 149150. Gilder, G. (1997). Technology Report 2 (2). Gilder, G. (1998). Technology Report 3 (3). Guilfoyle, C.(1995). Ventors of Agent Technology. UNICOM Seminar on Intelligent Agents and their Business Application. 8-9-November, London, pp. 135-142. Jennings, N. R. (1995). Controlling Cooperative Problem Solving in Industrial Multi-Agent Systems Using Joint Intentions. Artificial Intelligence, 75 (2), pp.195-240. Jennings, N. R., J. Corera, 1. Laresgoiti, E. H. Mamdani, F. Perriolat, P. Skarek, and L. Z. Varga
54