A commitment-oriented framework for networked manufacturing co-ordination

In the rapidly changing world of market place evolution and pressures, many authors have studied new organizational forms. Within these new trends, this paper deals particularly with network organizations. An approach is thus proposed to integrate the overall business organization and to co-ordinate the business processes involved in achieving the overall organization goals. In this study, integration is concerned with the implementation of collaborative information structures, enabling efficient operation management and control among heterogeneous business entities. Thus, based on the contract theory from economic science, philosophical work done on conventions and the multiagent systems paradigm, a commitment-oriented co-ordination framework for business integration is proposed. These concepts present a new comprehensive formalization of business collaboration within networked manufacturing, insofar as they concern the modelling of many kinds of business interactions, including collaborative contingencies management and collaboration performance measurement. In order to illustrate this approach, a multiagent prototype using the commitment-oriented approach is finally presented.