Autonomic Solutions for Your Industry

Triggered by concrete business cases, Whitestein Technologies until recently has focused its application-oriented development activities on the telecommunications, logistics, and manufacturing industries. However, being convinced that its Living Systems Technology Platform has the potential to form a strong technological foundation for many other application domains and industries, the company in the past years has explored, in the context of few well-selected research projects, the use of its technology framework as a basis to develop and operate autonomic, self-managing business applications for other industries, exemplified by the following two cases from the financial services and health care industries.

Ten reasons for Living Systems autonomic business solutions

Example #1: Agent Mediated Trading System

Whitestein Technologies has developed an interesting example of an agent-based, autonomic application in the financial services industry in cooperation with Deutsche Boerse Group in the context of a joint research project: AMTRAS (Agent Mediated Trading System) is a securities trading system for the so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) market.

The Multi Agent System supports the securities trader for searching for suitable contract partners in the peer-to-peer OTC market, and for negotiating the specific contract terms of complex financial instruments. Even though only a prototype, AMTRAS could demonstrate that using the Living Systems Technology Platform in the field of securities trading is economically reasonable as well as conceptually and technically feasible.

Example #2: Decision Support for Organ Transplant Management

With the goal to validate the suitability of an agent-based, autonomic solution approach for the health care industry, Whitestein Technologies, in cooperation with Swisstransplant, the Swiss agency for organ transplant management, has developed the Multi Agent System OTM (Organ Transplant Management).

OTM facilitates the access for surgeons and physicians to both the data and procedures for effective coordination of the main OTM tasks, and it provides computational help for the relevant decisions that have to be taken under extreme time pressure by considering a substantial number of medical decision criteria as well as legal and organizational rules. Although the currently available OTM prototype still requires various refinements and extensive validation on real clinical cases, the project has demonstrated that agent-based, autonomic solutions can, as expected, substantially support demanding processes also in health care.

Conclusions and Implications

At the first sight, the two example cases might seem disparate. But a closer look reveals that they share the key characteristics that are vital for any application of agent-based, autonomic technologies to real-world problems: complex decision, coordination, and control processes, high real-time dynamics, uncertainty, time pressure, and distributed environments. Consequently, whenever enterprises and other organizations must optimize their processes, networks, and infrastructures in real-time, and must react timely and precisely to unexpected events, disruptions, and changed conditions in their environments, Whitestein's agent-based, autonomic technologies and solutions can come to rescue.

Ten reasons for Living Systems autonomic business solutions

Whitestein Technologies' Living Systems autonomic business solutions have unparalleled facilities to embrace the complexity and uncertainty in today's IT and business environments.

In particular, the Living Systems autonomic technology platform enables business solutions that:

• are agile by design,
• can intrinsically adapt to changing conditions at run-time,
• dynamically manage and optimize their own performance,
• sensibly reduce the need for human intervention,
• proactively work toward achieving any number of concurrent individual goals,
• distribute communications and control in lieu of a central authority,
• mitigate complexity to ensure solutions are expressed in simple, accessible terms,
• scale easily,
• support both service-oriented and event-driven architectures (SOA & EDA),
• integrate readily with commonly deployed business and operations software.