Agents for Cross-Organisational Business Interoperability

Increasing complexity of products and services together with shrinking lead times means that demands are often best satisfied through dynamic networks of collaborating enterprises. Businesses seek agile partnerships where companies focus on core business activities and partners provide complementary expertise. Successful collaboration demands a tight yet flexible integration of business processes. In this paper we focus on issues of process interoperability and the use of agents to support cross-organisational process interoperability. We maintain that an informed decision on the place of agents within this context demands a systematic approach: such an approach forms the core contribution of this paper. We apply a modified version of the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) framework of Gero as an organising schema to develop a clarifying structure; and to help determine the role of software agents. In particular, we use the formal elements of the FBS framework to identify those areas where agents may be applied. We highlight the need to combine this with appropriate mechanisms to promote semantic interoperability.