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T raditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large± scale, organisation± wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. T herefore, a new approach is needed. T o this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent± based business process management system. T he key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem± solving agents. T o enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is signi cantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. T o help demonstrate these bene ts, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real± world problem faced by British T elecom. Successful companies organize and run their business activities in an efficient manner. Core activities are completed on time and within the speci ed resource constraints. However, to stay competitive in today's markets, com± panies need to continually improve their efficiency± business activities need to be completed more quickly, to a higher quality and at a lower cost. To this end, there is an increasing awareness of the bene ts and potential com± petitive advantage that well± designed business process management systems can provide. Such systems can substantially improve efficiency by ensuring that business activities are better scheduled, executed, monitored, and coor± dinated.

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This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realized and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT (British Telecom) business process of providing a customer quote for network services.

In rural UK, businesses are often isolated and have much to gain from healthy networks, yet studies show that many rural business owners fail to network effectively. Information communications technologies offer new ways to network that might benefit rural businesses by expanding their reach. This study looked at online and face-to-face networking behaviour among rural micro-enterprises in Scotland in relation to the development of bonding and bridging social capital. Given the challenges of remoteness faced by many rural businesses, online networking is particularly useful in developing bridging capital, but is an unsuitable context for building the trust needed to gain tangible benefits. The article therefore highlights the importance of face-to-face interactions in developing trust and bonding social capital. Rural business owners face distinctive challenges with respect to online communications, which are explored in this article.

Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to exploiting a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, agile, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on the former, namely how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose. q

Norm-governed virtual organizations define, govern and facilitate coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in societies of agents. With an explicit account of norms, openness in virtual organizations can be achieved: new components, designed by various parties, can be seamlessly accommodated. We focus on virtual organizations realised as multi-agent systems, in which human and software agents interact to achieve individual and global goals. However, any realistic account of norms should address their dynamic nature: norms will change as agents interact with each other and their environment. Due to the changing nature of norms or due to norms stemming from different virtual organizations, there will be situations when an action is simultaneously permitted and prohibited, that is, a conflict arises. Likewise, there will be situations when an action is both obliged and prohibited, that is, an inconsistency arises. We introduce an approach, based on first-order unification, to detect and resolve such conflicts and inconsistencies. In our proposed solution, we annotate a norm with the set of values their variables should not have in order to avoid a conflict or an inconsistency with another norm. Our approach neatly accommodates the domain-dependent interrelations among actions and the indirect conflicts/inconsistencies these may cause. More generally, we can capture a useful notion of inter-agent (and inter-role) delegation of actions and norms associated to them, and use it to address conflicts/inconsistencies caused by action delegation. We illustrate our approach with an e-Science example in which agents support Grid services.

Large-scale multiagent systems have the potential to be highly dynamic. Trust and reputation are crucial concepts in these environments, as it may be necessary for agents to rely on their peers to perform as expected, and learn to avoid untrustworthy partners. However, aspects of highly dynamic systems introduce issues which make the formation of trust relationships difficult. For example, they may be short-lived, precluding agents from gaining the necessary experiences to make an accurate trust evaluation. This article describes a new approach, inspired by theories of human organizational behavior, whereby agents generalize their experiences with previously encountered partners as stereotypes, based on the observable features of those partners and their behaviors. Subsequently, these stereotypes are applied when evaluating new and unknown partners. Furthermore, these stereotypical opinions can be communicated within the society, resulting in the notion of stereotypical reputation. We show how this approach can complement existing state-of-the-art trust models, and enhance the confidence in the evaluations that can be made about trustees when direct and reputational information is lacking or limited. Furthermore, we show how a stereotyping approach can help agents detect unwanted biases in the reputational opinions they receive from others in the society.