Sofia: Agent Scenario For Forest Industry Tailoring Ubiware Platform Towards Industrial Agent-Driven Solutions

Current economical situation in Finnish forest industry desperately calls for higher degree of efficiency in all stages of the production chain. The competitiveness of timber-based products directly and heavily depends on the raw material cost. At the same time, the successes of companies, that use timber, determine the volumes of the raw wood consumption and, therefore, drive forest markets. However, wood consuming companies (e.g. paper producers) can not unilaterally dictate logging and transportation prices to their contractors, because profitability of those, has already reached its reasonable margins (Vesterinen, 2005, Penttinen, 2009). Recent research conducted in 2005-2008 shows extremely high degree of inefficiency in logistic operations amongst logging and transportation companies. Some of them have already realized the need for cooperative optimization, which calls for cross-company integration of existing information and control systems; however privacy and trust issues prohibit those companies from taking the open environment solutions. Therefore, the researchers have suggested new mediator-based business models that leverage the utilization and preserve current state of affairs at the same time. New business solutions for logistic optimization can be built, when a unified view on the market players is possible. Nevertheless, with fast development of communications, RFID and sensor technologies, forest industry sector is experiencing a technological leap. The adoption of innovative technologies opens possibilities for enactment of new business scenarios driven by bleeding edge ICT tools and technologies. We introduce an application scenario of the semantic agent platform called UBIWARE to the forest industry sector of Finland.