Automatic formation and analysis of multi-agent virtual organization

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.