supportingdecisionsinreal-timeenterprises.docVIP

Supporting Decisions in Real-Time Enterprises: Autonomic Supply Chain Systems1 Words = ~ 7075 Daniel E. O’Leary University of Southern California Supporting decisions in real-time has been the subject of a number of research efforts. This paper reviews the technology and architecture necessary to create an “autonomic supply chain” for a real time enterprise for supply chain systems. The technologies weaved together include knowledge-based event managers, intelligent agents, radio frequency identification, database and system integration and enterprise resource planning systems. Keywords: Real Time Enterprises, Autonomic, Supply Chain 1. Introduction This chapter provides an overview of decision support applications for real time enterprises and then provides a detailed review of an emerging view of supporting real time supply chain decisions. The emerging view makes use of a number of technologies, some linked to other previous applications, others not always linked with supporting decisions or decision support systems. It integrates those technologies into an overall architecture that treats the supply chain as a real time enterprise for which we need to develop an “autonomic” system. The paper also examines the DSS roles of such autonomic systems, which ultimately provide support, despite the substantial capabilities built-into the system architectures. Accordingly, this paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 investigates the supply chain and use of different technologies in the supply chain. Section 3 reviews some of the previous research in supporting decisions in real time enterprises. Section 4 summarizes some of the key technologies supporting supply chain decisions in real time enterprises. Section 5 drills down on some examples of the use of the autonomic supply chain. Section 6 briefly summarizes the paper and discusses some extensions and reviews the paper’s contributions. 2. Supply Chains This section presents some analysis of t