Agent-based service-oriented collaborative architecture for value chains of SMEs

Abstract

Current ICT trends provide new opportunities to implement some well-known models of e-collaboration between business partners, namely Virtual Organizations. The orientation towards Enterprise Social Computing naturally complements the way companies do business with each other, thus the new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 based solutions can help to develop systems better suited for modern business needs. This paper presents an architecture based on SOA and Intelligent agents, which is aimed to address the needs of European SMEs involved in ERP software business. The solution is based on the concept of Digital Business Ecosystem, an environment and software infrastructure, which can help a community of potential business partners to establish and maintain valuable business relationships. Such ecosystem provides its members with value-added services like reputation management, peer-to-peer negotiation of business terms and flexible partner search through usage of Intelligent Agents technology in overall SOA-based framework.

Digital business ecosystem: Literature review and a framework for future research

“…The key recommendation is the need to develop a DBE oriented architecture instead of relying on existing approaches, which lack the capability to deal with specific requirements such as multi-tenancy, selforganising and autonomous platform optimisation (Fischer, Scholten, & Scholten, 2010). Despite this admonishment, some existing DBE architectures such as FISEA (Vargas, Cuenca, Boza, Sacala, & Moisescu, 2016) and PANDA solution architecture (Svirskas, Ignatiadis, & Briggs, 2008) are still based on the principles of the service-oriented architecture. In addition, these architectures are still conceptual and not rigorously validated empirically.…”

A Diversity Analysis of the Impact of an Interoperability Tool to a Business Ecosystem

“…[18] introduces a platform for digital business ecosystems based on knowledge models for enabling useful recommendations to SMEs participating in the ecosystem. Additionally, [19] presents an approach to build digital business ecosystems based on request-based virtual organisations, where SMEs try to increase the competitiveness and their chance to react to market changes by forming virtual organisations with complementary SMEs. Even when these approaches focus on SMEs, they do not consider any case study using actual data.…”

Supporting Business Processes for Collaborative Alliances of Software Service Providers

“…Other works have proposed processes for dealing with collaboration but focused on single issues. For example, Danesh and Raahemi [18] focused on services management; Haines and Rothenberger [19] on how to glue different services in cohesive SOA solution; Svirska et al [20] on the supporting services infrastructure; Santanna-Filho et al [21] on innovation among SSPs; BS 11000 British Standard only handles collaborative bidding processes [47]. In terms of EU funded projects, for instance, ECOLEAD [6] DBE [22], COIN [23] and GLONET [24] have developed platforms and visions to support collaboration among (also) software providers, but without identifying which more concrete processes are necessary to support when creating and maintaining the alliance.…”