A Hybrid E-Institution Model for VOs

In order to pursue their objectives, the groups of agents seem to be well organized according to predefined structures and unambiguously defined concepts. At the same time, the interaction presents some dynamic aspects, that is, the virtual organizations (VO) undergo a life cycle from the objectives formation to the task division, task allocation, plans formation, negotiations, contracts formation, and the final VO dissolvement or evolvement under exceptions. Although E-institutions provide facilitation to the former issues, the facilitation of VO in different stages is still blurred. Hence, this paper proposes a hybrid E-institution model including the static organization structure aspect and the dynamic aspect, provide assistance to the agent interactions. On the one hand, the E-institutions are modelled statically to make the agent cooperation trustable and predictable in terms of ontologies, behavior norms, and organization structure. On the other hand, the E-institutions keep repositories of instantiated (dynamic) information, provide services to facilitate the dynamic VO in different stages. Also, this paper presents explicitly formal descriptions of the static organization structure, dynamic information and institutional services to different VO stages.

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