Agent-based coordination support framework for virtual organization

Abstract

As partnership networks are temporary rather than permanent in virtual organizations, the coordination of agile inter-organizational workflow becomes an important issue. But the latter is difficult because of the autonomy of participating organizations and the frequency and range of change request types. In this dissertation, an agent-based framework for adaptable inter-organization workflow management is proposed. Agent technology is employed to satisfy the requirements of an adaptive inter-organizational workflow, such as the encapsulation of the process knowledge of participating organizations, dynamic formation of a temporal virtual organization to serve an inter-organizational workflow instance, and dynamic reconfiguration of a virtual organization to adapt to change requests from customers. In the framework, a change propagation model is used to represent the knowledge to handle a change request - through the coordination of participating agents that act on behalf of the participating organizations. The plug and play functionality of change propagation models enables the easy addition of new types of change request. The detail of the framework is explained via a real inter-organizational workflow.