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Tracking & Managing Materials Flow |
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Tracking & Managing Materials Flow |
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Intelligent Agent Processes (IAPs) are executable programs, which are run as background processes on a Windows based computer. They are based on Tau Adaptor principles.
Most IAPs consist of a Python script which, when executed, calls upon the MxPclass library, which then dynamically links to all the libraries the IAP needs to access databases, exchange data with remote computers, send Emails and files. This includes linking with third party libraries to exchange data with process control systems and equipment and well as to exchange data with systems that use REST interfaces.
Accessing databases, as well as external systems is simplified by the use of the MxPclass library, which reduces accessing databases to five simplified methods: Lookup, Fetch, GetNext, Store and Run. This makes it possible for IT people, business analysts, manufacturing engineers and other people who are not expert programmers to develop their own IAP control scripts or to easily understand and modify IAP scripts written by others.
Experience has shown that a typical IAP, such as to move changes in customer data from one system to another, requires less than 100 lines of Python script and, as a result, can be quickly created by someone who is not an expert programmer. Even better the functions performed by an existing IAP can be easily understood and modified if needed by someone who is not a Python programmer.
Experience has shown that a typical application may require dozens of IAPs all running independently on different schedules to, for example, exchange data between a barcode tracking system, such as BellHawk, and an ERP system. For this reason, MilramX has a web-browser interface, through which Python scripts can scheduled, run and monitored. As described in the next section, the web-browser interface interacts with the scheduling mechanism through a Control database.
This enables MilramX to also be run “headless” with changes to schedules and the like controlled remotely through the MilramX SOAP/XML web-services interface.
Please click here to learn more about the Scheduling Intelligent Agent Processes
