Web Services/Agent-Based Model for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration

Web Services technology is a promising computing paradigm for applications integration over the Internet. Use of Web services and related technologies facilitates the implementation of virtual enterprises across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. This paper proposes a Web services/agent-based model for inter-enterprise collaboration. It presents a multi-agent model in different levels of the enterprise’s system architecture to accomplish a suitable selection of a registered service, to check the status of a process, to realize users’ requests, and to react to them in a collaborative way with other agent-based Web services. Moreover, the paper proposes a multi-agent model to define a dynamic workflow capable of coordinating and monitoring the workflow processes.