Agent-based formation of virtual organisations

Norman, Timothy J.; Preece, Alun; Chalmers, Stuart; Jennings, Nicholas R.; Lück, Michael; Dang, Viet Dung; Nguyen, Tri-Dung; Deora, Vikas; Shao, Jianhua; Gray, W. A.; Fiddian, N. J.

doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2004.03.005

Cited by 135 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Nevertheless, if the buyer wants to secure more agreements, it should be greedier in making commitments. Our extended model is also currently being used in a number of real world applications to form and maintain coalitions in business and e-science virtual organizations [22] and in an internal project of BT concerned with logistics planning [23].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Nguyen¹,

Jennings

2005

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

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Automated negotiation by software agents is a key enabling technology for agent mediated e-commerce. To this end, this paper considers an important class of such negotiations -namely those in which an agent engages in multiple concurrent bilateral negotiations for a good or service. In particular, we consider the situation in which a buyer agent is looking for a single service provider from a number of available ones in its environment. By bargaining simultaneously with these providers and interleaving partial agreements that it makes with them, a buyer can reach good deals in an efficient manner. However, a key problem in such encounters is managing commitments since an agent may want to make intermediate deals (so that it has a definite agreement) with other agents before it gets to finalize a deal at the end of the encounter. To do this effectively, however, the agents need to have a flexible model of commitments that they can reason about in order to determine when to commit and to decommit. This paper provides and evaluates such a commitment model and integrates it into a concurrent negotiation model.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Nguyen¹,

Jennings

2005

Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

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“…Like our proposal, [12] allows tasks to be shared, however they only allow sharing of a task based on capacity whereas we allow sharing based on capabilities as well. Additionally we cover the effects of such sharing on the members and on the process model.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally we cover the effects of such sharing on the members and on the process model. Besides, [12] is based on Agent Technology whereas our work is at a higher level of abstraction than a platform or technology specific solution.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling Virtual Organisations: Structure and Reconfigurations

Reiff-Marganiec

Rajper

2011

Adaptation and Value Creating Collaborative Networks

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Abstract. Organisations have to adapt rapidly to survive in today's diverse and rapidly changing environments. The idea of virtual organisations emerged as an answer. There is a strong need to understand virtual organisations (VOs) in a formal way: changes can have side effects and hence one might wish to understand precisely what consequences a change might have. The Virtual Organisation Modelling Language (VOML) consists of sub-languages to model different aspects of VOs such as their structure or operational models: VO-S deals with structural aspects while VO-R addresses reconfigurations. The concepts are exemplified through a travel booking VO that needs to cope with extra demands imposed by a large event such as the Olympic games.

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“…In the former case, we have made advances in the areas of auctions (Dash et al, 2007Rogers et al, 2007a;Vetsikas et al, 2007;Gerding et al, 2008), coalition formation (Dang and Jennings, 2006;Fatima et al, 2009;Rahwan and Jennings, 2007;Chalkiadakis et al, 2008;, automated negotiation (Fatima et al, 2006;Karunatillake et al, 2009;Ramchurn et al, 2007;Fatima et al, 2004), trust and reputation , flexible reasoning strategies for workflows (Stein et al, 2009a) and decentralized coordination (Rogers et al, 2007b, Farinelli et al, 2008. In the latter case, we have built applications using these techniques in areas such as: virtual organizations (Norman et al, 2004), emergency response (Chapman et al, 2009), sensor networks (Padhy et al, 2006;Kho et al, 2009;, mobile sensors (Stranders et al, 2009), computational grids (Stein et al, 2009b) and personalized recommendations (Wei et al, 2005;Payne et al, 2006).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Computational Service Economies: Design and Applications

Jennings

Rogers

2009

Studies in Computational Intelligence

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Many modern computing systems have to operate in environments that are highly interconnected, highly unpredictable, in a constant state of flux, have no centralized point of control, and have constituent components owned by a variety of stakeholders that each have their own aims and objectives. Relevant exemplars include the Web, Grid Computing, Peer-to-Peer systems, Sensor Networks, Cloud Computing, Pervasive Computing and many eCommerce applications. Now, although these areas have somewhat different areas of emphasis, we believe they can all be viewed as operating under the same conceptual model. Namely, one in which: (i) entities offer a variety of services in some form of institutional setting; (ii) other entities connect to these services (covering issues such as service discovery, service composition and service procurement); and (iii) entities enact services, subject to service agreements, in a flexible and context sensitive manner. Moreover, we believe agent-based computing, with its emphasis on autonomous, flexible action and interaction, is an appropriate computational model for conceptualizing, designing and implementing such systems (Jennings, 2000;Jennings 2001). In particular, such agents are a natural way of viewing flexible service providers and consumers that need both to respond to environmental change, while being able to work towards their individual and collective aims. Moreover, the interactions between these agents need to take place in some form of electronic institution that structures the interactions and can provide an effective matching of the appropriate producers and consumers. Everyday examples of such institutions might include: eBay, Second Life, Betfair exchanges or World of Warcraft. Nevertheless, in the work described here, we will focus specifically on trading institutions and in particular computational service economies that mediate the exchanges between software agents in the area of software services.In more detail, when thinking about the design of such computational service economies there are two major perspectives that need to be considered (Dash et al., 2003). First, there is the design of the institution itself; this can essentially be thought of as the rules of the game. This covers issues such as who are the valid participants (e.g. buyers, sellers, intermediaries), what are the interaction states (e.g. accepting bids, negotiation closed), what are the events causing state transitions (e.g. bid, time out, proposal accepted), what are the valid actions of the participants (e.g. propose, accept, reject, counter-propose) and what are the reward structures (e.g. who pays and who gets paid for what). Second, there is the design of the strategies for the agents that participate in the institution; this can essentially be thought of as how to succeed in the game. Such strategies are very much determined by the institutional rules and are essentially the decision making employed to

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Agent-based formation of virtual organisations

Cited by 135 publications

References 11 publications

Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Managing commitments in multiple concurrent negotiations

Modelling Virtual Organisations: Structure and Reconfigurations

Computational Service Economies: Design and Applications

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