Virtual Enterprises and Workflow Management as Agent Coordination Issues

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International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems 11(3 & 4), pages 355–379
September-December 2002

Agents and multiagent systems (MAS) have already proved suitable for dealing with the complexity of today B2B application scenarios. Application environments such as virtual enterprises (VE) and inter-organisational workflow management systems (WfMS) specially call for the integration of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. In this article we first recognise VE and workflow management as agent coordination problems, then discuss how objective coordination – that is, coordination from outside agents – can help to model VE and WfMS. Finally, we show the impact of an agent coordination infrastructure like TuCSoN on the engineering of highly dynamic VE and WfMS, by discussing a simple case study.

journal or series
book International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems (IJCIS)