SPA ˇV the integration of Simulated and Physical Agents system
Fu-ren Lin, Shih-ming Lin
The Application of SPA ˇV a Supply Chain Example
Download the Developed Software
Software Installation and Running Instructions
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We introduce an integrated agent system, called SPA, which coordinates simulated and physical agents to provide an efficient way for organizations to enhance their competence.
The SPA, utilizing the corresponding capabilities of simulated and physical agents, can connect information systems to execute business processes. Simulated agents simulate and analyze organizationsˇ¦ mutual interactions to support physical agents in making decisions by making use of the information gathered by physical agents. The SPA possesses the communication and referencing ability to maintain individual organizationsˇ¦ up-to-date views of the outside world, and then adapts to changes accordingly.
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The Application of SPA ˇV a Supply Chain ExampleFigure 1 below shows the SPA embedded in an organizational information system to coordinate the analysis ability from simulated agents and the decision-making facilitation from physical agents.
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Figure 1. The framework of SPA
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In this SPA, Swarm serves as the example of a simulated agent platform, and JADE as that of a physical agent platform.
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An OEM assembly plant, which produces digital still cameras in the electronic industry, is introduced here as an example to demonstrate how SPA improves the entire supply chain performance. Figure 2 shows the BOM (bill of material) of a digital camera, where items printed in bold face are the key components of a digital camera.
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Figure 2. BOM of a digital still camera
The most critical portion of the supply chain that produces digital camera is shown in Figure 3. Every stage of the supply chain, ranging from distributors to the second tier suppliers, predicts their downstream demand in the coming time periods and places orders to their upstream suppliers. The upstream suppliers deliver their finished goods to their downstream customers.
Figure 3. The critical portion of supply chain of digital camera
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Download the Developed Software
Figure 4 below shows the built environment of the distributed supply chain. The entities in the supply chain includes consumers, distributors, private brand company, assembly plant, 1st tier suppliers, 2nd tier suppliers and a time teller. Time teller in this example is used to synchronize the time of every organizations. Consumers feed the market demand data to distributors. Each organization in the supply chain equips with its SPA.
Move your mouse pointer over the entities in Figure 4, click on the entities and then you can download the SPA that represents every entity.
Figure 4. The Environment of the Distributed Supply Chain
The software can also be downloaded below:
1. consumers
2. distributors
6. circuit board assembly plant
7. display panel assembly plant
8. wafer fab.
10. LCD fab.
11. time teller
Software Installation and Running Instructions
The SPA integrates Jade and Swarm to combine the communication ability of physical agents and analyzing ability of simulated agents. Therefore, before setting up the SPA embedded entities of the supply chain, first thing to do is to install j2se, Jade platform and Swarm platform. Due to that the SPA requires large amount of memory to maintain the belief system, it is suggested that the SPA embedded entities should be installed in distributed environment. Therefore, j2se and Swarm should be installed in every computer where SPA is set up. Jade is an option since the essential packages of Jade had been bundled in the SPA.
This SPA employs Sun Microsystem JDK 1.5.0_06 as the Java platform, Jade v3.3 as the physical agents platform and Swarm v2.2.1 as the simulated agents platform.
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The following procedures can help you set up the SPA for the supply chain:
1. Download consumers.zip and unzip this file in a certain computer. Memorize the computer ip address of this computer , e.g. 192.168.0.108, for later use.
There are some important files inside consumers.zip :
marketFeatures.txt can be used to set the attribute values of the consumers' demand.
generateConsumersDemand.bat can be executed to generate consumers' demand quantity according to marketFeatures.txt. The generated data is written to a file named demand.txt.
startConsumers.bat can be executed to start Jade Remote Agent Management Platform and a physical agent of consumers as Figure 5 shows.
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Figure 5. Jade Remote Agent Management Platform
2. Download the SPA zip files assembly.zip, ccd.zip, circuit.zip, control.zip, display.zip, distributors.zip, lcd.zip, privateBrandCompany.zip, spa.zip, wafer.zip, distribute them to different computers and unzip them. Open the *.profile.xml in every SPA zip files for the supply chain entities ranging from distributors to LCD fab. Find the tag named JadePlatformHost, fill in host ip of the Jade Remote Agent Management Platform as the computer ip address in procedure 1, e.g. 192.168.0.108. Execute the file startOrg.bat in every SPA to start the physical agents and simulated agents of every supply chain entities.
3. Execute startTimeTeller.bat in timeTeller.zip.
The source code of SPA software, consumers and time teller are listed below for references.
1. SPA
2. consumers
3. time teller
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Any questions or opinions are welcomed. You can contact us by email at d9042805@student.nsysu.edu.tw
revised 2006.04.09 MAIS Lab. All rights are reserved
