Virtual enterprises and workflow management as agent coordination issues

Agents and multiagent systems (MAS) have already proved suitable for dealing with the complexity of today B2B application scenarios. Application environments such as virtual enterprises (VE) and inter-organizational workflow management systems (WfMS) specially call for the integration of heterogeneous resources, services, and processes. In this article, we first recognize VE and workflow management as agent coordination problems, then discuss how objective coordination - that is, coordination from outside agents - can help to model VE and WfMS. Finally, we show the impact of an agent coordination infrastructure like TuCSoN on the engineering of highly dynamic VE and WfMS, by discussing a simple case study.