| Summary: |
Virtual Organizations are a major trend in cooperative business. Specialization and flexibility are some of the key aspects of an every day more dynamic and global market. The concept of Virtual Organization has been applied to many forms of cooperative business relations, like outsourcing, supply chains, or temporary consortiums. We are particularly interested in this later case, since it clearly addresses the demand for flexible and dynamic arrangements between different enterprises.
Technological support to the creation and operation of such relationships is arising in many forms. In particular, multi-agent system technology is a suitable approach towards the automation of (part of) the Virtual Organization lifecycle. However, this technology generally assumes that computational agents are autonomous entities that interact in order to fulfill their private goals (that is, an enterprise's interests). In order to model realistic business engagements, agreements must be expressed by means of negotiated Electronic Contracts, which must be subject to a set of contractual norms and amenable to monitoring and enforcing activities.
This project aims at developing a software framework - an Electronic Institution - where agents representing different enterprises can interact in a regulated fashion. The concept of an Electronic Institution is related to real-world institutions that define the norms and rules of the society, regulating the activity of its individuals. We intend to specify and implement a normative framework that imposes such governance to computational agents, including general norms and rules, as well as those directly related to contractual activities. Within this normative layer, a representation formalism for contracts will be devised, allowing contracts to be validated and their execution to be verified.
Together with these regulations, institutional services assisting contractual activities are of primary importance, specifical  |
Summary
Virtual Organizations are a major trend in cooperative business. Specialization and flexibility are some of the key aspects of an every day more dynamic and global market. The concept of Virtual Organization has been applied to many forms of cooperative business relations, like outsourcing, supply chains, or temporary consortiums. We are particularly interested in this later case, since it clearly addresses the demand for flexible and dynamic arrangements between different enterprises.
Technological support to the creation and operation of such relationships is arising in many forms. In particular, multi-agent system technology is a suitable approach towards the automation of (part of) the Virtual Organization lifecycle. However, this technology generally assumes that computational agents are autonomous entities that interact in order to fulfill their private goals (that is, an enterprise's interests). In order to model realistic business engagements, agreements must be expressed by means of negotiated Electronic Contracts, which must be subject to a set of contractual norms and amenable to monitoring and enforcing activities.
This project aims at developing a software framework - an Electronic Institution - where agents representing different enterprises can interact in a regulated fashion. The concept of an Electronic Institution is related to real-world institutions that define the norms and rules of the society, regulating the activity of its individuals. We intend to specify and implement a normative framework that imposes such governance to computational agents, including general norms and rules, as well as those directly related to contractual activities. Within this normative layer, a representation formalism for contracts will be devised, allowing contracts to be validated and their execution to be verified.
Together with these regulations, institutional services assisting contractual activities are of primary importance, specifically devoted to the creation and operation of Virtual Organizations. These services include negotiation mediation, contract templates, ontologies, and contract validation, monitoring and enforcement.
The execution of contracts that formalize cooperative business operations imposes some concerns in which the integration of different workflows is concerned. Therefore, in this project we also intend, as a complementary task, to address the interdependencies between inter-organizational workflow enactment and contract specification and execution monitoring.
At a more advanced stage, we consider the exploitation of the accumulated experience from the operation of the Electronic Institution, enabling the evolution of the underlying normative framework.
Finally, it is our goal to integrate and evaluate the developed framework with a realistic case-study. This will include the specification of a real-world scenario from the home automation domain, for which a field company is integrated in the project. |