• jeudi 10 avril 2003 : EPUM-GII, Campus St Jérôme - salle de Conférences (rez de chaussée)
  
  
  • 14h30 : Agent-oriented design of novel architectures for ERP and WfM systems - Nick Szirbik
    Department Information & Technology, Faculty of Technology Management
    Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherland
    
    Résumé :
    ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and WfM (Workflow Management) systems represent today the core of the various Business Information systems (BIS) for domains like manufacturing and distribution, banking and financial services, education and non-profit organisations, healthcare nd government-related organisations. ERP and WfM systems are deployed as integrated solutions for businesses. The growing complexities of these monolithical and standardised software packages make the installation process, maintenance and the continuous upgrade more and more difficult and extremely costly. A novel approach is to break the monolithical architecture in function-based components, which can be used as stand-alone (or at least loosely coupled) modules. However, the interfacing and coordination mechanism necessary to make the modules working together properly poses the same difficulty and cost as the ones for using monolithical (hard-coupled) architectures. Agent-based architecturing, offer a compact, hierarchical and simple design technique for novel types of BIS. Implementations of such designs will offer a far higher level of information system flexibility and also reduced costs of deployment and upgrade. Modules from the standard packages can be re-used by "agentification". It is envisaged that the adoption of such architectures will start in supply networks formed by SMEs and virtual enterprises.