A mobile agent architecture to enable collaborative information system survival

Abstract

Economical constraints impose to enterprises to regroup themselves into virtual enterprises to be more reactive. This association will create interdependencies between virtual enterprise processes, which can be a problem in case of a process failure, because such an issue can jeopardize the whole activity of the virtual enterprise. Thus, it seems relevant to set «survival» mechanisms enabling to improve processes reliability. First, we propose a method to determine how the information system resources supporting the processes are used. Then, we define the architecture of a system in charge of managing process survival. We designed the architecture so that it is adapted to a large scale, heterogeneous and dynamic context, which characterizes virtual enterprises. We validate our approach with a prototype giving its first results.