Artificial intelligence and virtual organizations

Abstract

VIRTUAL COMPANY HAS BEEN DEFINED AS ONEwhere "complementary resources existing in a number of cooperating companies are left in place, but are integrated to support a particular product effort for as long as it is viable to do so. ... Resources are selectively allocated to the virtual company if they are underutilized or if they can be profitably utilized there more than in the 'home' company." [4]. In addition, virtual organizations are designed to facilitate three types of capabilities:•Create or assemble productive resources quickly, •Create or assemble productive resources frequently and concurrently, and •Create or assemble a broad range of productive resources (such as research, manufacturing, and design).Although the idea of virtual organizations is not new [4], recent developments in information technology capabilities, such as the World-Wide Web (WWW) and artificial intelligence (AI), allow the development of new implementations of virtual organizations that exploit the capabilities of those new technologies. Information technology can be used aggressively, replacing or supporting human actions. Information infrastructure, such as the WWW, facilitates communications between and within virtual organizations, allowing development of widely dispersed virtual organizations.Since intra-and intercompany resource availability can change minute to minute, with advantage accruing to parties able to arbitrage resource availabilities rapidly, virtual organizations use information technology to supplement limited resources and cognitive capabilities. Humans have limited ability to keep track of what is going on in the broad range of virtual organization activities, given the tight time constraints and limited resources required and used by virtual organizations. This is exacerbated by frequent interruption of their work, with recent research indicating that white-collar employees receive a communication (electronic, paper, or oral) every five minutes. As a result, AI provides virtual organizations the ability to mitigate the limitations and constraints of human agents in order to monitor and control substantial resources without the time constraints inherent in human organizations.The use of agents, facilitators, and knowledge query and manipulation languages, together with negotiated ontologies, can provide a workable, reliable, and fiexible base of systems used in creating the platforms for virtual organizations. Virtual organizations may be the first large-scale industrial application of AI, beyond its fragmented use in knowledge-based systems and robotics. However, without the research that produced a theory of Definitions of TermsA command center provides Interfaces and communication capabilities for human actors that allow them to monitor agent and virtual organization activity. In their classic form, they are like military war rooms, where agent activi-ties can be watched. A computational agent is a con> puter program that functions autonomously or semiautonomously in communication with other computational ag...

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