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Tracking & Managing Materials Flow |
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Tracking & Managing Materials Flow |
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Many staff and management people in manufacturing and industrial distribution organizations spend most of their time doing “intelligent grunt work” tasks which include:
All of this is so that these people can do one of two things:
The amount of intelligent grunt work has increased substantially since the
year 2,000 due to changes from long-run make-to-stock to short-run
quick-turnaround manufacturing, as well as the dramatic increase in Government
regulations.
Much of this intelligent grunt work, along with gathering and analyzing the data upon which information and decision are based, can be performed much more efficiently, and at a lower cost, by a cloud of intelligent agents, running on networks of computers, rather than by people.
In automating these tasks, we need to recognize that there is specific knowledge where decisions can be made automatically based on rules and mathematical algorithms.
But, more frequently, there is also general knowledge, where the breadth of knowledge of people, as well as their intuition, has to used to make decisions about what data means and to whom to forward the resultant information.
As a result, intelligent agents are, for the most part, best used for automatically gathering and analyzing data, from a variety of sources, alerting people when they need to take action, presenting the resultant information in a meaningful form, and then automatically relaying the decisions made by people to other people or systems that need the resultant information.
Sometimes, decisions can be fully automated, where specific knowledge is available, but often intelligent agents function best in a decision support advisory role.
In most industrial and commercial operations, multiple events, which could impact decision making, occur at random times, in parallel, at many different locations. As such, it is important that these decision support functions take place in parallel in near real-time.
Hence the need for multiple intelligent-agents all running in parallel, exchanging information with each other, rather than using one large regenerative AI program, which can take a long time to run on a large expensive super-computer.
Please click here to learn more about How Intelligent Agents Solve these Operations Management Problems.
