Agent-Based Brokerage for Virtual Enterprise Creation in the Moulds Industry

Abstract

Brokerage and partners search is an important activity in the creation phase of a virtual enterprise (VE), where the most adequate consortium of enterprises should be selected to respond to a given business opportunity obtained by a broker. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based architecture to support this fUnctionality in the context of a cluster of twelve enterprises in the moulds and die sector. The system includes a broker agent, a facilitator and consortium agents that plan the possible VEs, and a set of agents representing the enterprises participating in the cluster. The contract-net protocol is used to collect bids from cluster members and to select the most adequate ones. In case the cluster does not cover all the requirements a more general search for partners can be performed on Internet-based directories of enterprises.

Inter-enterprise Collaboration Management in Dynamic Business Networks

“…The B2B middleware is in some extent comparable to agent-based approaches, such as MASSYVE [29]. The main difference seems to be the separation of business-application services and B2B middleware services from each other.…”

A Framework for Broker Assisted Virtual Enterprises

“…Other research work [Molina, 2000] [Rabelo, 2000] proves that the Broker notion is a really promising and viable approach in Virtual Enterprises. Our proposal follows this tendency: the design and implementation of a Broker quite useful not only for the automation of the procedure of appropriate partner finding, but also for the VE's operational support.…”

Developing a Multi-agent Software to Support the Creation of Dynamic Virtual Organizations aimed at Preventing Child Abuse Cases

“…Most of all these problems have an easy solution when long term collaborations are considered. This is the reason why different authors have begun to consider that the formation of such organizations has to take place in the context of Virtual Organization Breeding Environments , pool communities (Do et al, 2000), virtual industrial parks (Nayak, 2001), virtual industry clusters (Siqueira & Bremer, 2001;Rabelo et al, 2000), etc., The VO Breeding Environments, like the other equivalent concepts, are composed of organizations that are prepared to collaborate in long term relations . When a collaboration opportunity is identified, a subset of the VBE members can be rapidly selected to form a virtual organization.…”

“…), including its hierarchical variant (Ouzounis, 2001), since it is easier to implement and allows greater control over the resulting DVO. The button-up approach (Rabelo et al, 2000), in turn, leads to forms of Dynamic VOs more efficient and agile, but its control is often far more complex. Based on the study of the different approaches, we have created a generic and simple model with a multi-approach orientation which pools the advantages of the existing solutions and mitigates their weaknesses, making possible the formation of dynamic virtual organizations in a more effective and efficient way.…”