همکاری چند عاملی برای نظارت بر جریان کار کسب و کار به کسب و کار

Business-to-business (B2B) applications environments are exceedingly dynamic and competitive. This dynamism is manifested in the form of changing process requirements and time constraints. However, current workflow management technologies have difficulties to solve the challenges problems, such as: how to deal with the dynamic nature of B2B commerce processes, how to manage the distributed knowledge and recourses, and how to reduce the transaction risk. In this paper, a collaborative multi-agent system has been proposed. Multiple intelligent agents in our system can work together not only to identify the workflow problems, but also to solve such problems, by applying business rules, such as re-organizing the procurement and the transaction processes, and making necessary workflow process changes.

Business is moving rapidly into the Internet age as it has moved in the information age and industrial age before. Business-Intelligent (BI) is a key element for organization development, and ‘sharing knowledge is power’ becomes a critical environment for the business development [2]. At the early stage in the evolution of business-to-business (B2B) commerce, there is a combination of isolated data points and well-researched predictions. According to Forrester Research, US B2B commerce on the Internet will increase from $43B in 1998 to $1.3T in 2003 [1]. B2B commerce on the Internet is generating a lot of interest and moving quickly, many companies are developing their business via this new tool. On the B2B commerce platform, an open, end-to-end infrastructure of interoperable software solutions and hosted web-based commerce services has been built. Companies can do online trade efficiently, and can integrate and collaborate among B2B marketplaces, buyers, suppliers and commerce service providers. Such globally reached B2B eCommerce platform creates economies for companies around the world. “For B2B to become a successful channel for a business, all of the processes within that business have to be integrated and streamlined,” suggested Jean-Marc Favennec, IBM's Director of Software Marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “B2B is also highlighting many instances of inefficiency within businesses, especially in the areas of procurement and ERP, that need to be addressed through process redesign or process integration,” he added. In addition, many companies are exploring B2B commerce and make their existing business more efficient, by improving customer service, reducing inventory, increasing market depth and liquidity, and eliminating geographical and temporal barriers. How to manage the workflow processing taken in such eCommerce marketplace is a big issue to get benefits mentioned earlier. Due to such B2B eCommerce Marketplaces provide dynamic trade, the traditional workflow management, that is, one to many models could not fit this flexibility requirement. In our study, we address intelligent multi-agents to monitor the dynamic nature of transaction processes in B2B eCommerce marketplace.

Workflow management in the B2B eCommerce Marketplaces has gained great attention. Workflows are the structured activities or tasks that take place for a transaction processing in the B2B eCommerce marketplace. These activities frequently involve several database systems, user interfaces, and application programs. Unfortunately, most current WFMSs lack the functionality to support the dynamic nature of automating B2B transaction processes, such as information sharing, chained execution, and process changing. Multi-agent collaboration for workflow monitoring is supplement to existing workflow management techniques and has a number of advanced functionalities, such as flexibility and prediction. The major contribution in this paper is that we have designed a novel architecture for the workflow monitoring of the B2B eCommerce transaction. A number of different kinds of agents have been defined. Such different agents can collaborate together for the workflow-monitoring tasks. Through agent collaboration, when a problem occurs, our system is able to predict its possible consequences and try to reorganize workflow processes to reduce possible harms. Further more, through agent collaboration, a workflow process can receive relevant information from other processes or outside.