Pan-supplier stock control in a virtual warehouse

We describe the commercial application of agents to the handling of catalogue and stock-control for the selling of books on the internet. The primary characteristic of the target market is (very) low volumes over a (very) large number of items, thus agility and extremely low overheads are the essential factors for a viable business model. Being a new company (established 2004), without legacy software and with the freedom to make new choices, it was decided that the agent abstraction offered both short-term software engineering and longer-term business advantages. This expectation has been borne out in practice, in that it has been possible to construct an e-trading platform, using a 4-person team over a period of a few months, and that is now part of a live business operation handling just over 12,000 transactions daily. In this paper we explain how agents helped focus attention on the responsibilities of key software functions, how different functions should interact with one anothe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Emad El-Deen El-Akehal, Julian A. Padget
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Intelligent Agents, Large Number, Software Engineering, Viable Business Model