Software agent for production process based techno-economics modeling and assessment

• Main Author: Chen, Min.
• Other Authors: Shen Zhiqi
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Computer hardware, software and systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/16804
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Along with the fast changing of world’s economic condition these days, more accurate and detailed analysis for industry economics is required to secure both the profitability for investment and the creditability for academic study. However, the rapid growing of information available makes the analysis more complex. Fortunately, the tremendous development of technology provides a way to deal with the problem. Software agents, which are pieces of software that act for a user or other program in a relationship of agencyare, are more and more frequently applied in the industry field, helping to analyze the economic issues with large collection of data. The analysis results assist people to understand the industry’s economics and make decisions for the real production process. As the application of software agent becomes more and more popular, software developers have developed software agents for a variety of industry uses. They try to find ways of achieving more reliable outputs with less time and manual work, helping people to get maximum of benefits with minimum of effort spending. This project focuses on the liquid forging production process and tries to develop a software agent to analyze the production process based on the techno-economics modeling and assessment. It aims to produce an agent with some basic calculation performance and diagram generation functions, to act as a role of helper for user to assess and understand the cost for the production process. Besides the basic functions, the task-oriented agent also carries out some advanced ones such as uncertainty analysis and scenario analysis to accomplish the desired task -achieving a complete analysis of cost for the production process. iii It shows the fact that people could get more valuable information with less work through utilization of software agent to analyze data for industry production. It proves that software agent does help people carry out analysis and searches more efficiently and make more rational decisions for production. Most importantly, the ideology of combining mathematical, economic, financial and programming knowledge in this project serves as an example for more researches in related areas in future.