Martin Carpenter

Flexible Behaviours for Emergent Process Interoperability

The dynamic, volatile nature of many contemporary markets means that business opportunities are frequently fleeting. For many, successful leverage of these increasingly depends upon an ability to draw upon networks of partners having complementary skills and expertise; and thus establish ad hoc virtual organisations (VOs). Traditional VO formation derives from a top-down decomposition of the top-level goal, followed by a recruitment of members to implement individual process steps. This approach equates a company with a set of single fixed processes. We argue that this both limits the possibility of finding innovative solutions by restricting the behaviour of the companies; and makes the consideration of political matters problematic. The approach proposed in this aims to address these challenges through innovative use of agent technology, allowing process interoperability to emerge as a result of shared interests and complementary expertise of individual agents. Allowing a decomposition of the business opportunity into subprocesses to emerge from the interactions of the agents providing such processes means that agents can decide when and if to participate. This also foster more creative solution, for instance, an agent may customise its processes for an especially attractive business opportunity. Finally, the approach allows agents to take direct account of political aspects, such as with whom they can work, before offering to contribute towards a virtual organisation

Emergent Process Interoperability within Virtual Organisations

The current speed of market change means that business opportunities today are increasingly short-lived. To successfully pursue these opportunities, enterprises increasingly establish virtual organisations, drawing upon established networks of partners having complementary skills and expertise. The formation of a virtual organisation traditionally derives from a top-down decomposition of a business goal into a set of activities, followed by a recruitment of members to implement these activities. As this essentially presupposes a closed-world context, it does not foster innovative solutions and will fail if a decomposition cannot be found or the recruited members cannot work with each other. The approach proposed here aims to address these challenges through innovative use of agent technology, allowing process interoperability to emerge as a result of shared interests and complementary expertise of individual agents. Members of the virtual organisation are drawn from a comparatively stable yet open business ecosystem or virtual breeding environment [1] in response to a business opportunity which is “pinned” to a notice board as soon as it appears. We show how this approach can complement top-down decomposition, using a simple case study and a prototype. The prototype is implemented in JADE.

Recursive construction and evolution of collaborative business processes

Virtual Enterprises (VEs) bring together expertise and processes of different companies to react to a market opportunity. Here we propose a novel approach to support the collaborative construction and evolution of such VEs and their business processes, comprising a model of the VE, and a set of model construction rules and operators. Our approach is based on the principles of iterative elaboration, devolved decision-making and situatedness, and achieves flexibility by treating the processes of work, coordination and selection in a uniform manner. We argue that certain assumptions behind existing approaches make them unsuitable to the business practices we observed in the target business ecosystem. We then show how the proposed approach can underpin software support for informal business practices of collaborative process construction by manufacturing SMEs.

Activity Coordination for Flexible Processes in Instant Virtual Enterprises

This paper presents a novel approach to supporting the design and evolution of supply networks which integrates collaborative planning with last-minute responsiveness and supply network evolution. The underlying theoretical model is based on activity coordination (T.W. Malone and K. Crowston) and meta-management (A. Mowshowitz) to deliver two key contributions. Firstly, innovative and emergent compositions of value-adding activities and services are enabled by separating abstract requirements for activities such as transportation from providers (e.g. logistic suppliers). Secondly, responsiveness to last-minute changes of customer needs or transport disturbances is provided by postponing the allocation of providers to abstract activity requirements till the last possible moment, and continuously monitoring and improving the effectiveness of the supplier allocation.

Baselines for Joint-Action Reinforcement Learning of Coordination in Cooperative Multi-agent Systems

A common assumption for the study of reinforcement learning of coordination is that agents can observe each other’s actions (so-called joint-action learning). We present in this paper a number of simple joint-action learning algorithms and show that they perform very well when compared against more complex approaches such as OAL [1], while still maintaining convergence guarantees. Based on the empirical results, we argue that these simple algorithms should be used as baselines for any future research on joint-action learning of coordination.

Devolved Ontology for Smart Applications

Many smart applications allow enterprises to communicate effectively with and through interconnected computing resources, however, successful communication presupposes a shared understanding; a so-called semantic alignment.Devolved ontology was developed to promote semantic alignment in agile partnerships. We consider the approach to be promising for anyenvironment where multiple contexts interface and co-locate, including, for example, the Pragmatic Web, virtual organisations and indeed smart applications. We motivate and introduce devolved ontology and show how to use this to foster semantic alignment.

An Agent Based Approach for Balancing Commuter Traffic

Transport congestion within cities represents an omnipresent yet increasingly serious problem. Traditionally the main method of control available to combat it has been the efficient control of traffic lights. The recent rise of intelligent mobile devices carried by road users offers an additional point of control, potentially enabling the manipulation of the routes that people take within the city. The current paper combines the use of such devices with intelligent agents representing different transport segments within the city, including roads, trams, busses and trains. It fuses them in a novel technique which attempts to evenly spread the traffic load throughout the different transport options within the city. In addition the system is capable of rebalancing this load dynamically in response to any events which reduce the capacity of a given transport segment within the city. The system complements the existing work on traffic light control.

Design of a Suite of Visual Languages for Supply Chain Specification

Supply chain modelling and simulation by SMEs (Small-to-Medium Enterprises) is a challenging problem. This is due both to complexity of the supply chain models required and the lack of required expertise among the SMEs. The problem is important since SMEs need to represent and modify their evolving skills and processes to be visible in electronic marketplaces and supply chain design platforms. We demonstrate how this problem can be addressed by developing a suite of novel domain-specific visual languages and a support tool. The challenging setup of our research context motivated us to trial a new approach for the design of our visual languages and to employ a collaborative development process across our distributed research team.

Establishing agile partnerships in open environments: extended abstract

The increasingly complex and volatile nature of many contemporary markets means that demands are often best satisfied through dynamic networks of collaborating enterprises Successful collaboration demands tight, flexible integration of business processes, however, this assumes that an appropriate team has been assembled Traditionally, a toplevel service or goal is decomposed into component services or subgoals each of which is then matched to a provider This is a complex task and while automated tools exist, supported especially by the notions of service discovery and traders, significant guidance is typically sought from the user This imposes a substantial burden of interaction and considerable knowledge is demanded of a user to decompose to a level of detail which allows for matching to known services Problems arise if this is not the case and open environments, such as the internet, present additional difficulties: if a user is not up-to-date potential decompositions may be missed; new entrants into a market may not be recognised; etc Bottom-up approaches circumvent some of these difficulties, but also come at a price For example, where goal decompositions are available, these are typically much more inefficient; if there is only a fixed number of processes available within a system, the case of “no solution” may take considerable time to establish Moreover, since many bottom-up approaches distribute control, the system is vulnerable to malicious behaviour Thus, a certain level of trust is required.

Email-based Negotiation to Facilitate Collaboration in SME Networks

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) typically rely on emails to interact with other SMEs in a collaborative network. However, with the use of different document standards and interpretation techniques establishing a shared understanding of business documents (or emails) can be difficult and raise interoperability issues. In this paper we introduce Commius -- a zero cost enterprise system that aims to achieve seamless interoperability among collaborative SMEs. At the heart of Commius is a semantic alignment mechanism capable of automatically interpreting a document received by the system. However, when the automatic interpretation fails, Commius employs agent-inspired negotiation techniques to help achieve common understanding of the document with other Commius system (installed at sender or collaborative SME). This paper presents details of Commiuss email negotiation mechanism with the help of a running scenario that demonstrates how Commius-based negotiation can support SMEs achieve semantic alignment in collaborative networks.