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An Ontology and Multi-Agent Based Decision Support Framework for Prefabricated Component Supply Chain

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Abstract

Due to industrialization and informatization of the construction industry, prefabricated construction has attracted wide attention from both research and practitioner communities. In prefabricated construction, there are exacting requirements for information sharing. Also, data in a prefabricated component supply chain tend to be dispersed in design, production, transportation and other stages. In other words, such data are significantly multi-source heterogeneous. Without an effective way of participating in supply chain dynamic collaboration, decision-making at various stages and resource allocation can be extremely challenging. This paper proposes a decision support framework for prefabricated component supply chain based on ontology and multi-agent. The framework comprises the ontology layer (i.e. provides data support for the model), the agent interaction layer (i.e. serves as the communication hub to coordinate the data transmission between modules), and the agent simulation layer (i.e. simulates interaction behavior of participants, and supports decision making). Using the Shanghai Chenxiang Road Station complex project as a case study, the paper demonstrates the validity of the proposed ontology and multi-agent based decision support framework.

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Acknowledgements

The work by Juan Du is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71701121, in part by the Chinese Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project under Grant 17YJC630021. The work by V. Sugumaran has also been supported by a 2018 School of Business Administration Spring/Summer Research Fellowship from Oakland University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SHU-UTS SILC Business School, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China

    Juan Du & Hengqing Jing

  2. School of Building Construction, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Juan Du & Daniel Castro-Lacouture

  3. Department of Information Systems and Cyber Security, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo

  4. Center for Data Science and Big Data Analytics, Department of Decision and Information Sciences, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

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  1. Juan Du
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  2. Hengqing Jing
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  3. Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo
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  4. Vijayan Sugumaran
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  5. Daniel Castro-Lacouture
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Correspondence to Vijayan Sugumaran.

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Du, J., Jing, H., Choo, KK.R. et al. An Ontology and Multi-Agent Based Decision Support Framework for Prefabricated Component Supply Chain. Inf Syst Front 22, 1467–1485 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-019-09941-x

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