Authors:
Santtu Toivonen
1
;
Tapio Pitkäranta
1
;
Heikki Helin
2
and
Jung Ung Min
3
Affiliations:
1
VTT Information Technology, Finland
;
2
TeliaSonera Finland, Finland
;
3
Stanford University, CIFE, Terman Engineering Center, United States
Keyword(s):
Interaction protocols, software agents, adaptability, construction process.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Agent-Oriented Programming
;
Agents
;
Artificial Intelligence
;
B2B, B2C and C2C
;
B2C/B2B Considerations
;
Business and Social Applications
;
Cloud Computing
;
Communication and Software Technologies and Architectures
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
e-Procurement and Web-Based Supply Chain Management
;
Semantic Web Technologies
;
Services Science
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Web Information Agents
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
We present an interaction protocol based approach for facilitating distributed construction processes. In our approach, software agents represent various participants of a construction project. Examples of such are contractor, subcontractor, and supplier. These agents are supposed to communicate according to predefined interaction protocols. Should an agent be unaware of some protocol needed in the process, it benefits from adopting it. We approach this problem with interaction protocol descriptions serialized in a commonly agreed upon format and design our agents so that they can adapt to the descriptions. We present a scenario in the field of construction industry, where the project participants do not know in advance how to communicate with each other. However, by adapting to the interaction protocol descriptions provided by the respective parties they are eventually able to interact.