An Enabling Mobile/Intelligent Agent Framework for Distributed Logistics Management Solutions

摘要

The astounding growth of the Internet and the changes it has made to the global economy bring many challenges and opportunities to the logistics management area. These challenges include the need to provide solutions that are intelligent, adaptive and reactive to the changes in today's ever changing economy. As the Internet grew from academic circles to become commercially available to the world, companies and the software industry quickly realized new strategies were needed to embrace e-Business. These strategies ranged from Business to Consumer marketplaces to Business to Business frameworks. These strategies have addressed some of the challenges presented to the business communities implementing e-Business solutions. However, challenges to logistics management area caused by the new e-Business requirements have not been fully considered.rnThe focus of this paper is to present a Mobile/Intelligent agents framework that will significantly enhance the ability of logistics managers to provide intelligent, scalable solutions to logistics problems such as those that occur in e-Business. The paper is divided into the following sections: Section 1 provides an introduction that gives an overview of specific challenges encountered in distributed logistics problems. Section 2 focuses on the current approach to Business to Business software. Section 3 defines our Mobile Logistics Framework; one application is described in Section 4. Section 5 provides a conclusion.