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Speeding up business through intelligent agents
Globalization and the consequent need to integrate and coordinate between companies that work together for temporary operations, took Steven Willmott to work in the integration of autonomous agents within business processes. The problems that arise in such scenarios out are non trivial. Contracts, agreements and negotiation between intelligent agents and the extension of the Web Services paradigm are also Willmott's bet in a new company: 3scale.
Steven Willmott also recently started a new commercial activity, the company 3scale Networks. The company works on in collaboration with the research activities he is pursues at UPC. Steven Willmott obtained his PhD studies at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The main topic of his research was on distributed systems applied to the management of high capacity backbone networks. During his time at EPFL he coordinated the European project Agentcities. When he decided to move to UPC, in Barcelona, he did it with the projects he had started in Switzerland; moving the coordination of Agentcities to LSI. Agentcities This initiative created a data network accessible and available inside platforms associated to cities. Each platform represents a certain real place or city and we find examples like Agentcity in Paris where one could find all types of information: cinemas, hotels, theatres, taxis...etc. There are more than one hundred sixty platforms like this one all over the world. The interesting side is that each platform can be used to experiment and to demonstrate services based on intelligent agents that take decisions in representation of its users or that it learns from them and it suggests them sights based on the users' interests. Agentcities subsequently helped generate other projects in the KEMLG group: Agentlink, CONTRACT, @lis and ALIVE. Agentlink Nowadays business interactions involve a large number of parties. Rather than working with a centralized software design that could solve the whole process, the focus based in agents has many specialized agents in some part of the business process and they represent real people or companies. However, all of these agents needs the others to coordinate and hence instantiate a productive business process, or to design a new solution. They should agree, negotiate or share the job to collaborate and be able to be coordinated. Steven Willmott, Ulises Cortés, Javier Vázquez, Javier Béjar and Luigi Ceccaroni have spent their energy to structure and organize these autonomous agents for the last few years. One of the key approaches used is to apply the notion of "contracts" between agents to define their relationships. Such contracts are described with a format that follows Description Logics, a variant of first order logics. They are documents that describe formal obligations. This part of the research that is more related to contracts is the base for the project ALIVE, coordinated by Javier Vázquez. ALIVE brings together institutions and organizations build around electronic environments in order to establish electronic contracts. The practical results of this project are being very positive. |
The difficulty they find is to get agreements between the information systems of different companies. Imagine we want to distribute our products through Spain so we would like to connect our systems with RENFE's system to do the transport. With nowadays technology the way to succeed is developing a big number of programs and counting on a lot of people working for it. The idea is to get this done almost automatically. Our agents will go through the net announcing that we want to distribute our products and we need to connect with RENFE. RENFE's agents will give us a confirmation and the negotiation will start automatically without human's intervention. Steven Willmott and his group are getting closer to this scenario. The process is not totally automatic just yet, but makes work much easier. With Internet technology advancing very quickly it made sense to move to carrying out work from a commercial perspective as well as academically. This gave to impulse to create a new company, 3scale Networks, last June. 3scale Networks works on with contracting subjects, negotiation and volume of sales for systems based on Web Service. The company works on the practical side of Web Services. The technology draws on the research done during so many years, but takes a simpler, more direct approach. The business scenarios in the real world have turned simpler than the ones anticipated during the research in some dimensions, but more complex in others. 3scale Networks is a technology and services company. Contributing solutions to the web services and web 2.0. In real terms, adding:
3scale Network includes these qualities and develops solutions for the following areas:
3scale Network has just moved to the Barcelona Activa incubator at Llacuna Street, 162. Steven and the team encourage you to go and visit them! Our best wishes for this new company! |
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