Agent-Based Integrated Services for Timber Production and Sales

and forestry. To solve some of the problems in forestry and agriculture, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Saarland Ministry of Economics founded the Cooperative Agents and Integrated Services for Logistic and Electronic Trading in Forestry and Agriculture (Casa) project. The Casa project focuses on developing an agentbased information and trading network (ITN). In particular, the project seeks to establish mobile, integrated services in selected application scenarios within forestry and agriculture. Casa ITN supports the main business processes that users perform in customer-oriented dynamic timber production, mobile timber trading, and electronic cereal trading. The paradigm that informs the Casa ITN project is integrated commerce, an operational extension of traditional e-commerce that entails getting customers more involved in ordering activities so that contractors can more efficiently fulfill orders. I-commerce also entails more effective practical integration of supply-chain processes. In this light, Casa ITN offers its users several i-commerce techniques for negotiating, communicating, and exchanging information more effectively. We anticipate that these techniques will lead to more effective integration of production, logistics, and trading processes in other industries as well.