Distributed agents for cost-effective monitoring of critical success factors

Business managers should promptly respond to important events (e.g. exceptions) that happen on a set of critical success factors (CSF). A CSF monitoring system is thus essential in capturing the events for the managers. It monitors the information items concerning the CSF. Once an update is detected, critical events may be validated, logged, and signaled for the manager. Since CSF monitoring is often time-critical and mission-critical, a CSF monitoring system should be cost-effective: It should detect updates in a timely, complete, and robust manner without incurring heavy loading to related information servers (e.g. query overheads) and the Intranet (e.g. communication overheads). To achieve that, the monitoring tasks should be properly distributed and coordinated on the Intranet. We propose a multiagent CSF monitoring paradigm, CSFMonitor, in which distributed agents share a collective goal of cost-effective CSF monitoring. An experiment on monitoring real-world financial CSF is conducted. The delivery of CSFMonitor to businesses may robustly provide more complete and timelier information without causing serious problems to the original information processing in businesses.