Agent-Based Distributed Collaborative Monitoring and Maintenance in Manufacturing
This paper proposes an agent-based approach for real-time collaborative monitoring and maintenance of equipments and machines. The proposed approach automates the maintenance management process by utilizing intelligent software agents. The maintenance schedules are achieved by automated real time negotiation among software agents representing geographically distributed field engineers and a broker. The paper presents a detailed system design and a prototype implementation of the collaborative monitoring and maintenance system which can be used by maintenance managers in manufacturing industry as a tool to improve the efficiency and quality of maintenance scheduling. Test results show that the proposed approach has potential for automating the maintenance management process in manufacturing environments.

title: An autonomous agent development environment for engineering applications
abstract: Agent technology is playing an increasingly important role in developing distributed, intelligent, and collaborative engineering applications. The innate difficulties of interoperation between heterogeneous agent communities and rapid development of multi-agent systems have motivated the emergence of FIPA specifications and the proliferation of multi-agent system platforms or toolkits that implement FIPA specifications. This paper presents a FIPA compliant multi-agent framework called Autonomous Agent Development Environment (AADE). Originating from the engineering fields, AADE can facilitate the rapid development of collaborative engineering applications (especially in engineering design and manufacturing fields) through the provision of reusable packages of agent level components and programming tools. An agent oriented engineering project on the development of a collaborative product design environment is implemented based on the facilities provided by AADE.

title: Web Services/Agent-Based Model for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration
abstract: Web Services technology is a promising computing paradigm for applications integration over the Internet. Use of Web services and related technologies facilitates the implementation of virtual enterprises across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. This paper proposes a Web services/agent-based model for inter-enterprise collaboration. It presents a multi-agent model in different levels of the enterprise’s system architecture to accomplish a suitable selection of a registered service, to check the status of a process, to realize users’ requests, and to react to them in a collaborative way with other agent-based Web services. Moreover, the paper proposes a multi-agent model to define a dynamic workflow capable of coordinating and monitoring the workflow processes.

title: Adaptive Negotiation for Agent Based Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling
abstract: Manufacturing scheduling problem is typically NP-hard. While traditional heuristic search based approaches have been considered not suitable for dynamic environments because of their inherent centralized nature, agent based approaches are promising for their decentralized, autonomous, coordinated, and rational natures. However, many challenging issues still need to be addressed when applying agent based approaches to complex distributed manufacturing scheduling environments. One of them, namely adaptive negotiation , is to integrate intelligence and rationality into negotiation mechanisms and make the system more adaptive in dynamic environments. This is very important to the manufacturing scheduling problem because the agent based scheduling process is essentially a coordination process among agents. Adaptive negotiation is a way to achieve the coordination in a dynamic scheduling environment. By adaptive negotiation we mean that more intelligence and rationality are integrated into the negotiation mechanism, thus make it adaptive to the changes of the dynamic scheduling environment. To achieve this, issues at three levels have to be addressed: system architecture, agent architecture, and heuristics. At the system architecture level, the system must have the architecture with corresponding characteristics to support adaptive negotiation among agents. At the agent architecture level, an agent must have rational abilities (decision making mechanisms) embedded in the architecture to transfer the knowledge (in our case, negotiation heuristics) and environment conditions into specific negotiation behaviors. The third level is the heuristics level. By this we mean the knowledge that needs to be integrated into the agent negotiation mechanism and can be used by agents in terms of rational decision making.

title: An Agent-Based E-engineering Services Framework for Engineering Design and Optimization

title: Combining mediation and bidding mechanisms for agent-based manufacturing scheduling (poster)
abstract: 2.  Future manufacturing systems need to be dynamically reconfigurable to produce customized products in small batches, even down to lot sizes of one unit, with fast turnaround in a cost-efficient manner. Such systems must be implemented with dynamic scheduling mechanisms for rapidly responding to emergent production tasks and orders, and other unforeseen situations such as production tardiness and machine failures.

title: Community Information Management
abstract: We introduce Cimple, a joint project between the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. Cimple aims to develop a software platform that can be rapidly deployed and customized to manage data-rich online communities. We first describe the envisioned working of such a software platform and our prototype, DBLife, which is a community portal being developed for the database research community. We then describe the technical challenges in Cimple and our solution approach. Finally, we discuss managing uncertainty and provenance, a crucial task in making our software platform practical.

title: Constraint-Based Entity Matching
abstract: Entity matching is the problem of deciding if two given mentions in the data, such as "Helen Hunt" and "H. M. Hunt", refer to the same real-world entity. Numerous solutions have been developed, but they have not considered in depth the problem of exploiting integrity constraints that frequently exist in the domains. Examples of such constraints include "a mention with age two cannot match a mention with salary 200K" and "if two paper citations match, then their authors are likely to match in the same order". In this paper we describe a probabilistic solution to entity matching that exploits such constraints to improve matching accuracy. At the heart of the solution is a generative model that takes into account the constraints during the generation process, and provides well-defined interpretations of the constraints. We describe a novel combination of EM and relaxation labeling algorithms that efficiently learns the model, thereby matching mentions in an unsupervised way, without the need for annotated training data. Experiments on several real-world domains show that our solution can exploit constraints to significantly improve matching accuracy, by 3-12% F-1, and that the solution scales up to large data sets.

title: Source-aware Entity Matching: A Compositional Approach
abstract: Entity matching (a.k.a. record linkage) plays a crucial role in integrating multiple data sources, and numerous matching solutions have been developed. However, the solutions have largely exploited only information available in the mentions and employed a single matching technique. We show how to exploit information about data sources to significantly improve matching accuracy. In particular, we observe that different sources often vary substantially in their level of semantic ambiguity, thus requiring different matching techniques. In addition, it is often beneficial to group and match mentions in related sources first, before considering other sources. These observations lead to a large space of matching strategies, analogous to the space of query evaluation plans considered by a relational optimizer. We propose viewing entity matching as a composition of basic steps into a "match execution plan". We analyze formal properties of the plan space, and show how to find a good match plan. To do so, we employ ideas from social network analysis to infer the ambiguity and related-ness of data sources. We conducted extensive experiments on several real-world data sets on the Web and in the domain of personal information management (PIM). The results show that our solution significantly outperforms current best matching methods.