A Multi-agent Infrastructure for Enhancing ERP system Intelligence

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning systems efficiently administer all
tasks concerning real-time planning and manufacturing, material
procurement and inventory monitoring, customer and supplier
management. Nevertheless, the incorporation of domain knowledge and
the application of adaptive decision making into such systems
require extreme customization with a cost that becomes unaffordable,
especially in the case of SMEs. In this paper we present an
alternative approach for incorporating adaptive business
intelligence into the company's backbone. We have designed and
developed a highly reconfigurable, adaptive, cost efficient
multi-agent framework that acts as an add-on to ERP software,
employing Data Mining and Soft Computing techniques in order to
provide intelligent recommendations on customer, supplier and
inventory management. In this paper, we present the architecture and
development details of the developed framework, and demonstrate its
application on a real test case.