Enabling technologies for the creation and restructuring process of emergent enterprise alliances

In today's world, it is of utterly importance for enterprises to react in a timely and flexible way to upcoming complex market demands. One solution is given by the concept of virtual enterprise and enterprise alliances, respectively. In order to function efficiently and flexibly such enterprises need to be deeply integrated. Based on previous work combining the concepts of virtual enterprises, holonic organizations and multi-agent systems to support such deep integration, the paper discusses in detail how well-suiting partners and contributors for a given (bunch of) task(s) can be found using today's state-of-the-art technologies. Mapping an enterprise alliance onto a multi-agent system is enabled by a methodology equipping each agent with the ability to deal and consider its own goals (goals of the unit it represents) as well as the goals of the unit in which it is integrated (the higher level unit).