Software Agent Architecture for Managing Inter-Organizational Collaborations

Abstract

The growing importance of cooperation among organizations, as a result of globalization, current market opportunitiesand technological advances, encourages organizations to dynamically establish inter-organizational collaborations.These collaborations are carried out by executing collaborative business processes among the organizations. In thiswork we propose an agent-based software architecture for managing inter-organizational collaborations. Two types ofagents are provided: the Collaboration Administrator Agent and the Process Administrator Agent. The former allowsorganizations setting up collaborations. The latter allows organizations executing collaborative business processes. AColored Petri Net model specifying the role, which an organization fulfills in a collaborative process, is used to carryout the behavior of the Process Administrator Agent that represents the organization. Planning and execution of theactions of the Process Administrator Agents are driven by a Colored Petri Net machine embedded to them. Thus,Process Administrator Agents do not require to have defined at design-time the protocols they can support. Inaddition, we propose a model-driven development method for generating Colored Petri Net models from acollaborative process model defined as interaction protocol. Finally, an implementation of the agent-based softwarearchitecture and methods based on model-driven development are presented.