A MULTI-AGENT BASED APPROACH FOR LOAD DISTRIBUTION IN MULTI-ENTERPRISE ENVIRONMENTS

This paper presents and discusses an automated contracting mechanism for load distribution in multi-enterprise environments. Within each enterprise, tasks are allocated by a multi-agent system whose agents develop cooperative processes in order to determine the best nodes for execution. When prootable, a negotiation process is started as a way to select a remote enterprise to execute a speciic task. The use of a dynamic organizational structure, the concepts of resource oriented contract and virtual node, the dynamic deenition of the task market extent and the possibility to precisely deene the internal behavior of the agents, provide the developed mechanism with the exibility to adapt to the speciicities and dynamic characteristics of almost every enterprise and organizations environments.

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