An agent-based B2B collaboration platform for executing collaborative business processes

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations establish Business-to-Business (B2B) collaborations with their business partners. Inter-organizational collaboration is carried out through the execution of collaborative business processes. Organizations are requiring and undergoing the setting up of dynamic B2B collaborations, instead of conducting face-to-face negotiations and agreements for executing collaborative processes. This implies that business partners, maybe without a previous relationship, agree dynamically on the execution of collaborative processes based on predefined models of these processes. In this work, we propose an B2B collaboration platform which provides agent-based systems and interaction mechanisms in order to enable organizations to establish dynamic agreements with their partners and carry out the decentralized execution of collaborative processes. Agents use models of collaborative rocesses to enact them in a dynamic way. The role an organization performs in a collaborative process is translated into a Petri Net model that a collaboration agent interpret to execute the process.