Agents for process coherence in virtual enterprises

Open environments such as the Internet— and even corporate intranets— enable a large number of interested parties to use and enhance vast quantities of information. These environments support modern applications, such as manufacturing, virtual enterprises, and ubiquitous information access, which involve a number of information sources and component activities. However, without principled techniques to coordinate the various activities, any solutions would yield disjointed and error-prone behavior, while consuming excessive effort to build and maintain. The agent metaphor, long in study in artificial intelligence, has recently become popular in mainstream computing, largely due to its suitability for open environments. Agents can be thought of as active objects with some special properties tailored to open environments. For our purposes, the key aspects of agents are their autonomy and abilities to perceive, reason, and act in their environment, as well as to socially interact and communicate with other agents [7]. When agents interact with one another they form a multiagent system. As part of a multiagent system, agents can capture and apply the semantic constraints among heterogeneous components in order to enact distributed workflows. Autonomy is critical in open environments. Consider a manufacturing scenario requiring supply-chain coordination. It is natural to model independent companies in a supply chain as represented by autonomous agents. But, at first sight, autonomy is a mixed blessing if the companies behaved arbitrarily, the supply chain would break. Consequently, our main technical challenge is to manage autonomy that is, how to maximize freedom without letting it devolve into chaos. We propose that the main basis for managing autonomy lies in the notion of commitments. A flexible formulation of commitments can provide a natural means through which autonomous agents may voluntarily constrain their behavior. By flexible, we mean that it should be possible to cancel or otherwise modify the commitments. Consider a situation where a purchaser is trying to obtain some parts from a vendor. We would like the vendor to commit to delivering the parts of the right quality to the purchaser. However, it is important that the supply chain be able to survive exceptions such as when the manufacturing plant goes down in an earthquake, or when the purchaser decides that it needs the parts to be of a lower error tolerance than initially ordered. Information cannot be understood independently of the processes that create or consume it. The desired flexibility of behavior and the ability to recover from failures require an approach that is sensitive to how those processes interact. We show that when agents are associated with each independent process, our flexible notion of commitments can capture the desired interactions among those processes