A flexible, agent-based ICT architecture for virtual enterprises

Virtual enterprises (VEs), in our view, are conglomerates of regular enterprises that collaborate on an ad hoc basis to carry out an inter-organisational business process. The virtual enterprise has a dynamic structure that depends on the particular process that needs to be carried out. Enterprises can join or leave the virtual enterprise at short notice, depending on the capacity and the opportunity. In recent papers, we studied the use of a mobile agent framework to support the co-ordination of the primary process in a virtual enterprise. We argued that the installation of standard software modules, called service bridges or docks, at the participant enterprises provides a suitable infrastructure for the use of mobile agents for this purpose. The deployment of mobile software agents using such modules has been studied in applications such as networked electronic trading and mediation of negotiations. The emphasis in these applications lies on demonstrating the potential of mobile agents for the support of complex decision problems. In this paper, we study the flexibility requirements an agile enterprise such as the VE imposes on its ICT support. We argue that a mobile agent-based ICT architecture will provide the required flexibility. We will discuss a number of change cases to illustrate flexibility. We examine the impact of these change cases on the requirements on the agent-agent and on the agent-system interaction. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.