Supporting virtual enterprise systems using agent coordination

Abstract

Open environments like the Internet or corporate intranets enable a large number of interested enterprises to access, filter, process, and present information on an as-needed basis. These environments support modern applications, such as virtual enterprises and inter-organizational workflow management systems, which involve a number of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. However, any execution of a virtual enterprise system would yield to disjoining and error-prone behavior without appropriate techniques to coordinate the various business processes. This paper reports on the design and implementation of a flexible agent-based framework for supporting the coordination of virtual enterprises and workflow management systems. The paper also shows how an agent coordination infrastructure, which is explained by social constraints, can impact on the engineering of highly dynamic virtual enterprises and workflow management systems by presenting a simple case study.

Petri net-based process monitoring: a workflow management system for process modelling and monitoring

“…For example, in [34] a multi-agent system is proposed to monitor the workflows associated to a given business process, so that they improve the system capabilities to deal with changes in the environment. In [37] an agent based system is also proposed to deal with coordination and management of workflows between virtual enterprises.…”

RFID Infrastructure for Large Scale Supply Chains Involving Small and Medium Enterprises

“…Virtualization implies the use of IT and communication technology by organizations in managing their interactions and key business operations with stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers and employees (Zarour et al, 2005). In a virtualized environment, the virtual devices are seen externally as handling different functions.…”

A Performance Study on a Multiagent E-Scheduling and Coordination Framework for Maintenance Networks

“…While the issues of collecting and using condition information have been addressed by the current generation of e-scheduling frameworks, organization autonomy and performance optimization have not received enough attention. Although the work in supply networks [7], [8] and virtual enterprises [9] generally consider organization autonomy, they may not be effective for maintenance networks because of the tightly related maintenance operations and the massive uncertainties involved. In our view, the next generation of e-scheduling frameworks will not only seek the needed information actively, but also optimize performance actively while facilitating autonomy.…”

“…This protocol may not be feasible for maintenance networks because it is often hard to identify the effective strategies beforehand in maintenance scheduling. A rule-based coordination infrastructure was presented in [9] for virtual enterprise systems, and information resource heterogeneity was addressed while impact of heterogeneous processor speeds and communication delays on system performance was not. Several approaches investigated optimal scheduling and coordination in different domains [7].…”

“…Some models are based on the contract net protocol [9], [15], [16], which is simple but not good for iterative optimization in the view that it is very difficult to change the commitments made previously, while several other models, such as generalized partial global planning [17], distribute planning capabilities to all the agents and employ an extendable set of coordination mechanisms for more generic applicability. In the case of unreliable and low-bandwidth communication, a coordination protocol was presented in [18] to allow the agents to choose actions locally based on the predetermined strategies, which can be decided offline or formed during periods of full communication.…”