Design And Implementation Of Interoperable Service Utilities For The Multi-agent Planning System R@MSES

Nowadays, importance and frequency of transport demands are increasing inthe world day by day. To gain more profit and satisfy the customer’s requirement,transport enterprises have to develop the transport services to become morecomprehensive. Meanwhile, the remoteness of production sites of enterprisenetworks and distribution centers has led to an increase of the number of demandsfor transportation. This increase of sales volume has also led to an increase oftransportation means (vehicles, planes, ships, etc.) with a consequent increase in thecapacity of communication channels (highways, airlines, shipping lanes, etc.), anincrease of storage areas (warehouses, airports, ports, etc.), and an increase inpollution impacting the environment sustainability. This need led emergence ofThird Party Logistics enterprises (3PL).3PL gets the transportation tasks from thesuppliers and then takes charge of the whole transportation process until distributinggoods to the customers.Interoperability to achieve collaborative transportation planning is our concernin the context of this paper. So the objective of this thesis is mainly about the designand implementation of interoperable service utility (ISU) and its integration toexisting transportation scheduling system R@MSES. Based on the POVES modelwhich has been implemented in the R@MSES before, an interoperable modelI-POVES which contains ISU is introduced to be specialized on dealing withinteroperable problems. The utilities can be divided to two parts–virtual customerand virtual transporter which will be used for matching and translation ofterminologies from local ontology to global ontology and vice versa. Virtualcustomer can receive transport demands from other customer systems and virtualtransporter can send transport tasks to other3PL enterprises. The design of virtualtransporter is the most important. In this model, there are many3PL enterprises butwe take openTCS which is a control system for track-guided vehicles as an exampleto implement ISU.In the R@MSES, ISU has already implemented and integrated. It shows a goodperformance for dealing with interoperable problem during the transport scheduling.In the case study test, ISU can connect with multi3PL enterprise. R@MSES distributes the transport tasks to several3PL for scheduling. In this thesis, a conceptalignment is also developed to contribute enterprise data interoperability approachat semantic level. Via this alignment, virtual customer and virtual transporter cancommunicate with openTCS rapidly. The establishment of the concept alignmentneeds the understanding of the ontology of both I-POVES and openTCS and thedesign of information transformation. In the I-POVES, there are4positions whichare important for transportation scheduling. A good algorithm will be shown tooptimize the transformation of4positions in this thesis. Finally this thesis will talkabout the use of ontology to cooperate with other3PL enterprises. In this thesis,ISU performs well in the information exchange between R@MSES and3PLenterprises in order to deal with interoperable problems.