Wen-Bin Yu

Enhancing Business Networks using Social Network Based Virtual Communities

Purpose – To enhance an entrepreneurs business network through the integration of the social network concepts and design principles of virtual communities.Design/methodology/approach – This study documents the design and initial deployment of a virtual community case, Innovation Information Infrastructure, based on social network concepts.Findings – Basic design principles, deployment strategy, and future directions for social network‐based virtual communities are presented.Research limitations/implications – Because of resource and time constraints, only basic content service, communication tools, and transaction functions were implemented in the initial deployment. Future extensions of this study may include development of a personalized and intelligent information retrieval system utilizing data mining techniques, development of advanced communication features to promote active participation, and creation of automatic social network‐tracking tools to monitor an individuals network evolution.Practical...

A prototype multi-agent ERP system: an integrated architecture and a conceptual framework

Abstract This paper proposes a prototype multi-agent enterprise resource planning (MAERP) system that utilizes the characteristics and capabilities of software agents to achieve enterprise wide integration. A software agent is a self-contained, autonomous software module that performs assigned tasks from the human user and interacts/communicates with other applications and other software agents in different platforms to complete the tasks. Four types of intelligent software agents (coordinating agents, task agents, data collecting agents, and user interface agents) are examined and discussed in the proposed MAERPS architecture. We demonstrate how the proposed prototype MAERP system takes advantage of existing information systems among various functional areas to achieve the system integration of commercially available enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, while avoiding numerous problems encountered during a typical ERP implementation.

A Multiple-Agent Based System for Forecasting the Ice Cream Demand Using Climatic Information

A multiple agent-based system is intended to capture complex behavioral patterns by utilizing a collection of autonomous computer systems (called agents) that can interact with decision makers and then learn, perform, and delegate tasks on their behalf. With its ability to handle a large amount of information from heterogeneous sources in dynamically changing environments, a multiple agent-based system can significantly improve the company’s business intelligence and operational efficiency. Though rarely used in demand planning, this paper proposes a multiple agent-based system for demand forecasting of ice cream which poses unique challenges due to volatility and seasonality of ice cream consumption. To validate the usefulness of the proposed system for demand planning, the forecasting outcomes of the proposed system was compared to those of traditional forecasting techniques. Our experiments showed that the proposed multiple agent-based system outperformed its traditional forecasting counterparts in terms of its accuracy and consistency.