Overview

Lost Wax is driving the commercial deployment of multi-agent systems and agent based computing. We are leaders in transforming the substantial academic research of recent years into commercial systems delivering real business benefit.

Today’s business environment is highly connected, global, fiercely competitive and subject to an ever-accelerating rate of change. There is increasing demand for greater responsiveness to market challenges and opportunities. In turn this demands greater flexibility in business processes.

A significant constraint for many business leaders is the time it takes to change monolithic processes and systems that support these business processes. Couple this with the demand for more ambitious and unpredictable requirements and it becomes clear why there is a growing movement towards adaptive architectures and applications designed for change and uncertainty. Agent oriented approaches to solving these issues can help businesses to model, design and build sophisticated distributed software systems.

Any organisation with complex and distributed business processes can benefit from multi-agent technology. Manufacturing, distribution and retail logistics constantly faces disruptive and unplanned events, where materials or skilled workers are in the wrong place or a missed deadline sets off a cascade of contingency activities. Financial services companies are facing increasingly complex regulation in a competitive online marketplace, which not only requires them to respond to customer needs for service, but also to increasingly collaborate with outside organisations. There is more demand for sophisticated marketing; customising products and services to the specific requirements of an individual customer. At Lost Wax we are certain that multi-agent software is the correct approach to creating responsive and adaptable business solutions to meet these demands.

Lost Wax Agent Business Analysis Methodology

The design of a multi-agent system will map on to an organisation’s individual decision-makers, who in reality make a business process work. Lost Wax has developed a business analysis methodology designed to analyse and model the key roles and activities in an organisation or business process. In collaboration with out clients' business stakeholders we create a working software model of the business processes and the key interactions. The model whilst necessary in assisting us in designing the eventual solution has real value in its own right. It can provide powerful insights into an organisation’s processes and the effect of changes to the process on that organisation. The ability to introduce new agents and real-world constraints into the model can illustrate new adaptive behaviours, overcoming broken or inefficient processes.

Production multi-agent systems

The next step after modelling the organisation’s processes is to implement a production version. We deploy multi-agent systems using a combination of industry-standard architectures and technologies, and the Lost Wax Agent Framework. We are able to implement agent software capable of operating with other e-commerce systems and distributed systems using XML or message-based protocols.

Our software engineers have developed a number of tools and techniques for implementing multi-agent systems. Our expertise is based on our deep experience of developing enterprise and mobile systems, and strong relationships in the international community of software specialists working in this field.

Industry Bodies

Our Chief Scientific Officer is Professor Nick Jennings, who leads a large agent research community at Southampton University. Nick provides direction in agent development initiatives and keeps us up to date with the latest research. We are members of FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents) and are active with the AgentLink community. We regularly sponsor international conferences and contribute to reviews.

FIPA Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents

AgentLink European Network of Excellence for Agent Computing