Agent Coordination Infrastructures for Virtual Enterprises and Workflow Management

Today's B2B application scenarios call for the integration of heterogenous resources, services, and processes, as in the case of Virtual Enterprises (VE) and inter-organisational Workflow Management Systems (WfMS). Agent-based approaches have already proven to be suitable to deal with the complexity of such application environments. In this paper we first recognise VE and workflow management as agent coordination problems, then discuss how objective coordination – that is, coordination outside the agents – can help to model VE and WfMS. Finally, we show how an agent coordination infrastructure like TuCSoN can impact on the engineering of highly dynamic VE and WfMS, by discussing a simple case study.