A Service Oriented and Agent-Based Architecture for the e-Collaboration of SMEs

The concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to flexibly address business needs with the use of Information Technology (IT) is increasingly being recognized as important for a company’s agility and responsiveness to change. A SOA approach can also help to design more agile web portals, in order to enable companies to increase their responsiveness and adaptability with regards to addressing a business opportunity as a collaborative Virtual Organization (VO). Value can be added to the operations of such a VO with the use of Intelligent Agents to automate the processes of finding collaboration partners and negotiating the creation of VOs based on user-defined business rules. This paper discusses these concepts and their benefits for Virtual Organizations based on the work of a European Union (EU) co-funded Information Society Technologies (IST) project examining these issues for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the European Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) industry.

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