AGENTS FOR MANAGING BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERACTIONS - Software Agents for Managing Business-to-Business Collaborations

Abstract

Current market opportunities and the growth of new Internet technologies encourage organizations to dynamically establish Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations. B2B interactions are carried out by executing collaborative business processes among the parties. In this work we propose B2B collaboration agents for managing B2B interactions that allow organizations to dynamically establish collaborations and execute collaborative processes with their partners. The planning and execution of the actions of the agents that execute collaborative processes are driven by a Petri Net engine embedded in these agents. The role an organization fulfills in a collaborative process is represented by a high-level Petri Net model which is used to drive the behavior of the B2B collaboration agents representing the organization. Moreover, interaction protocols representing collaborative processes are executed by these agents without the need for protocols defined at design-time. Finally, an implementation of the B2B agents is presented.