Context-driven decision support in flexible networked organisations

Abstract

The paper proposes a context-driven approach to decision making in flexible networked organisations for the purpose of selecting partners for a specific task. The main idea of the approach is to represent the members of the networked organisation by services they provide. This makes it possible to replace the configuration of the networked organisation with that of services constituting it. Such representation benefits from the principles of the service-oriented architectures, such as service autonomy, abstraction, standardisation, and reusability. For the interoperability purposes the services communicate in terms of a common ontology. To improve the flexibility of the operational decision support each particular situation is described by a narrow context that contains only information that is relevant to the situation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2010.