Companies are often unaware of the potential value of corporate information and extent of data held in their systems. It is increasingly argued that analysis of such data and information can be transformed into knowledge that in turn can be used to gain business benefits such as a competitive advantage, minimization of costs, improved quality, responsiveness, or improved service to customers. This paper investigates the benefits of a systematic and interdisciplinary approach to research in knowledge management, particularly in investigating technical (‘hard’), organizational (‘soft’), as well as philosophical (‘abstract’) aspects of the concept. It describes in detail the framework used in research undertaken by the Centre for Knowledge and Business Process Management at Brunel University. We argue that this framework is useful to researchers and practitioners alike as it contributes to a systematic and more effective knowledge management approach. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The paper describes main features of an Intelligent Scheduler for Road Transportation Applications based on Magenta agent technology and characterized by a number of unique, advanced features such as real-time, incremental, continuous scheduling and schedule improvement, scalability from small to very large enterprise networks, multi-criteria schedule analysis and rich decision support for the user, pro-active agent negotiations.The scheduler is event driven, which means that it construct schedules taking into account the occurrence of all schedule affecting events (such as the arrival of a new order, order cancellation, truck failure, road unavailability and driver noshow). As an event occurs the scheduler rapidly re-schedules only the affected part of the schedule thus causing the minimum disruption to already allocated resources.The Scheduler has been tested on real data supplied by several UK Road Logistics operators.The Scheduler was developed using protected Magenta technology for agent negotiations in virtual environment and knowledge discovery.

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