We are witnessing a turbulent development of information technology and communication infrastructure. Logistics is not indifferent to the emerging, previously unknown possibilities of supporting it. Step by step, newer and newer information technologies are appearing in supply chain management, which are based on the use of this extensive ICT infrastructure.
An example of such a new technology is the so-called agent technology. It is gaining more and more popularity, as evidenced by the large number of international conferences devoted to this issue and the growing number of prototype and commercial solutions that use this technology.
Agent technology is very promising due to the possibilities of its application in logistics, mainly due to autonomous information acquisition in a distributed environment and high software mobility. Since the formation of extensive supply chains is synonymous with the formation of extensive information exchange networks, a platform for the direct implementation of agent technology is naturally created, and consequently, previously unknown business benefits are obtained, especially in relation to logistics activities.
The essence of agent technology
In common parlance, the word agent means someone delegated to work in a specific place and performing a specific task there in accordance with previously adopted assumptions. In IT terms, we speak of a software agent, that is, a program executed remotely, on another computer in the network or locally. Such a program operates according to the wishes of the user or another agent that may have launched it.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 4/2003.