Global Purchasing and Ordering Environment using Agent Technology

에이전트를 이용한 글로벌 구매 외주환경의 구축

The objective of this research is to construct and build a software platform to enable collaboration among enterprise headquarters, product designers, software engineers, manufacturing plants, and suppliers which are locate at different remote locations via internet. In specific, agent technology is adopted as a software vehicle to automate demand and supply process in the internet environment. Agents are programs that act on behalf of their human users to perform laborious tasks such as information locating, accessing, filtering, integrating, adapting and resolving inconsistencies. Global competion is forcing the present day industry to produce high quality product more fast and inexpensively. In Korea, most labor-intensive industries have moved to China and other Asian countries for cost reduction. The need for fast information exchange has increased among the remote locations for the cooperation and coordination. In this research, a virtual global purchasing and ordering system will be constructured that distributes production schedule among remote places, acts as a bridge between the headquarters and manufacturing plants, distributes tasks and collates different solutions between demand and supply using agent. The external communication protocol takes HTML format, internal message handling requires SGML for document exchange, and KQML for agent implementation. The expected benefits will be : reduced cost of real-time information exchange, realization of global manufacturing environment, the maximum utilization of internet for the enterprise data exchange.