Intelligent agent to support design in supply chain based on semantic Web services

In manufacture industry, better supply chain management (SCM) not only improves efficiency of business processes, but play important roles in a series of cost reductions. In a product manufacture, the initial design is more important from viewpoint of the cost reduction in the whole cycle. It becomes important how a designer collects the information on necessary parts for product design, and the system to search information efficiently at design stage is required. Information infrastructure to support design in SCM was developed on a semantic Web service environment that can provide interoperable service interfaces for integrated design attributes to agents and users. Design support agent (DSAgent), as a client for information infrastructure, helps the designer to find the desired product information. But this search process requires autonomy that lacks in DSAgent. As designers must change input values repeatedly to complete finding the desired product information, we suggest an autonomous DSAgent (ADSAgent) in this paper. To add autonomy, we used situation calculus, which is the schema for representing the dynamic changing world. The model to define the world was written in ConGolog statements, which is logic programming language based on situation calculus. This will facilitate user to find the desired product information and reduce user operations.