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CREATION OFVIRTUALENTERPRISES 575Agents and Mobile Agents
Agents have also become increasingly popular and are
well suited to support the functioning of Internet-based
VEs. Agents can be viewed as software entities, which
are semi-autonomous, proactive, and adaptive and which
have a long life. They can collaborate with each other to
work toward common or independent goals (Deshmukh,
Krothapalli, Middlekoop, & Smith, 1999; Krothapalli &
Deshmukh, 1999; Lange, 1999). Using an Internet-based
framework, agents that can help accomplish a number of
tasks in a VE can be designed and created. These tasks can
be system oriented (for example, monitoring and notifica-
tion of task completions) or product/process oriented (for
example, generation of a plan to assemble three parts).
Agents called “mobile agents” hold enormous potential in
revolutionizing the way in which VEs function. Amobile
agentis capable of replication and autonomous movement
from one VE site to another and of performing tasks based
on information collected from various sites in a VE. These
are in contrast tostationary agents or objects,which exe-
cute only on the system they reside on and when they need
to interact with objects on another system, use methods
such as remote procedure calling (RPC). Mobile agents
are not bound to their host site or system but can travel
(or “roam”) among the various computing hosts. Such an
agent can transport its state and code along with it to
another location, where it can resume execution. Several
university and industry projects have highlighted the ben-
efit of using mobile agents in distributed environments
(Cecil, 2002a; Lange, 1999). The potential advantages of
a mobile agent approach include overcoming network la-
tency (they can be dispatched from a remote control medi-
ator to act locally and eliminate latency necessary for real-
time response and control), encapsulating protocols, and
offering better performance, increased flexibility, and sup-
port dynamic response to changing scenarios. The tactical
advantage of performance is gained by sending a compo-
nent across the network to a VE site, where the work gets
completed. The computers in the VE need to be connected
only long enough to send the mobile components and later
to receive it back. This same concept comes in useful espe-
cially for monitoring remote activities in manufacturing
and other domains (Cecil, 2002b).Industry and University Initiatives Related
to Internet-Based VEs
Many industrial organizations with remote locations and
distributed resources and partners have adopted a VE
mode of functioning using the Internet as the commu-
nication backbone. The VE model has been adopted in a
wide variety of industries including aerospace engineer-
ing, airline and travel industry, shipbuilding, computer
manufacturing, healthcare, IT systems consulting, bank-
ing, electronic commerce, and telecommunications. In
general, organizations involved in the service and consult-
ing sectors (who do not produce a physical product for
customers but rather provide services) can use Internet-
based frameworks to exchange information seamlessly in
a distributed collaborative manner. Organizations such
as Ford, Boeing, the Sabre Group, Lufthansa, Schlum-
berger, Pratt and Whitney, Cisco Systems, Raytheon,Harvard University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Cen-
ter have adopted CORBA-based architectures to be more
agile and customer responsive (CORBA, 2002).
Boeing, the world’s largest producer of commercial air-
liners, uses a CORBA-based framework to integrate its
design, manufacturing, and resource management activi-
ties. The manufacturing and assembly activities at Boe-
ing involve as many as 3,000,000 individual parts for
each aircraft produced. Information integration, inven-
tory management, collaborative sharing of design, man-
ufacturing, and work-in-process data are extremely com-
plex and require a robust distributed IT infrastructure.
Boeing’s Internet-based VE computer architecture (which
is based on the OMA/CORBA model) can support more
than 45,000 users and 9,000 concurrent users in various
regions across the USA (CORBA, 2001).
The NIIIP project is a national initiative that focuses
on developing, demonstrating, and transferring (to in-
terested organizations) the technology to enable indus-
trial virtual enterprises. The National Industrial Infor-
mation Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) consortium is a
group of industry, university, and government organiza-
tions defining (and have defined) the NIIIP protocols as
well as demonstrating their use. Some of the consor-
tium members include CAD Framework Initiative, Digital
Equipment Corporation, IBM, General Dynamics Elec-
tric Boat, Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems Com-
pany, National Institute of Standards and Technology,
STEP Tools, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Texas In-
struments, and the University of Florida. Additional in-
formation about the NIIIP reference architecture can be
obtained from their Web site (NIIIP, 2002). NIIIP aims
to establish standards-based software framework proto-
cols as well as develop software and toolkits (as part of its
effort to provide a technical foundation) for implement-
ing virtual enterprises. There are four building blocks of
the NIIIP reference architecture, and they include com-
munication (using the Internet), use of object technology,
knowledge and task management, and common informa-
tion model specification and exchange.
Several U.S. federal programs have initiated projects to
design collaborative virtual environments. Among these
are the Distributed Knowledge Environment of the De-
partment of Defense; Intelligent Collaboration and Vi-
sualization initiative of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA); System Integration for Manu-
facturing Applications; National Advanced Manufactur-
ing test bed of NIST; Rapid Design Exploration and
Optimization (RaDEO), and Agile Infrastructure for Man-
ufacturing Systems (AIMS). A distributed Internet-based
process planning system called CHOLA has been devel-
oped at New Mexico State University (Cecil, 2001; Cecil,
2002a). CAD files and process planning modules are dis-
tributed among heterogeneous environments. Dynamic
information (such as design data, equipment capability
and availability, and tool availability) from remote loca-
tions is used by the VE (which includes ITESM in Monter-
rey, Mexico, and Penn State University in State College,
PA) to generate a process plan for various part designs
(Cecil, 2002a). Each site has an object request broker,
which acts as a communication infrastructure linking the
distributed sites via the Internet. This combined research