Software Agents for Management Dynamic Inter-Organizational Collaborations

Abstract

The globalization, modern markets, as well as new organizational management philosophies and advances in Information and Communications Technologies, encourage organizations to establish collaboration networks or inter-organizational collaborations. In this paper we propose a technology solution based on software agents which allows supporting the management of collaborative business processes in environments dynamic inter-organizational collaborations. First, we propose a software agent platform that integrates in agent specification´s the notions of Belief-Desire-Intention agent architecture with functionalities of process-aware information systems. The platform enables organizations to negotiate collaborations agreements in electronic format to establish dynamic inter-organizational collaborations and define the collaborative processes to be executed. Second, we propose a methodology that includes methods based on Model-Driven Development, which enable the generation of executable process models and the code of process-oriented agents, derived from conceptual models of collaborative processes. This methodology and methods are implemented and automated by software agents that enable the generations of these implementation artifacts, at run-time of the platform. Therefore, the platform enables the automatic generation of the technology solution that requires each organization to execute the agreed collaborative processes, where the generated artifacts are built and initialized in the platform, allowing the implementation and execution of these processes. In this way, the proposed agent-based platform allows to establish collaboration among heterogeneous and autonomous organizations focusing in the process-oriented integration.