Emergent Process Interoperability within Virtual Organisations

Abstract

The current speed of market change means that business opportunities today are increasingly short-lived. To successfully pursue these opportunities, enterprises increasingly establish virtual organisations, drawing upon established networks of partners having complementary skills and expertise. The formation of a virtual organisation traditionally derives from a top-down decomposition of a business goal into a set of activities, followed by a recruitment of members to implement these activities. As this essentially presupposes a closed-world context, it does not foster innovative solutions and will fail if a decomposition cannot be found or the recruited members cannot work with each other. The approach proposed here aims to address these challenges through innovative use of agent technology, allowing process interoperability to emerge as a result of shared interests and complementary expertise of individual agents. Members of the virtual organisation are drawn from a comparatively stable yet open business ecosystem or virtual breeding environment [1] in response to a business opportunity which is “pinned” to a notice board as soon as it appears. We show how this approach can complement top-down decomposition, using a simple case study and a prototype. The prototype is implemented in JADE.