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Automatic formation and analysis of multi-agent virtual organization

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 11, pages 61–75 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Virtual organization refers to the temporary teaming of enterprises. By sharing physical, human and knowledge resources via information technologies, a virtual organization enables member enterprises to share skills, costs, access to one another’s markets and, at the same time decrease the risk of investments. To realize this new generation of business model, the ability to form and operate virtual enterprise is very important. The paper describes our experience gained by implementing a multiagent system that simulates an artificial marketplace, for which we have derived several decision-making mechanisms in various stages of a virtual organization. We presented a negotiation protocol and a bid selection algorithm for agents to form a virtual organization. We adopted the Motivational Quantities framework to support the agent’s local reasoning process. In order to better understand the organizational problem, we adapted a statistical model that predicts the expected rewards of individual agents and the performance of the virtual organization. The comparison and analysis of the results from both the simulation and the model prediction are also presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Rd, 02747, North Dartmouth, MA

    Qinhe Zheng & Xiaoqin Zhang

Authors
  1. Qinhe Zheng
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  2. Xiaoqin Zhang
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This research is supported by UMass, Dartmound Research Foundation.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Zheng, Q., Zhang, X. Automatic formation and analysis of multi-agent virtual organization. J Braz Comp Soc 11, 61–75 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192371

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03192371

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