Agent-Based Inter-Organizational Workflow Management System

An Electronic Institution is a computational framework that provides a set of services supporting the lifecycle of Virtual Organizations. In a virtual organization, different business partners cooperate in order to achieve a common goal (the established contract), being the coordination of the corresponding inter-organizational workflow an important issue. This paper describes an inter-organizational workflow management architecture, based in multi-agent systems principles, aiming to orchestrate the contract execution and to obtain feedback from the shop floor level. Aiming to validate its correctness and applicability, a special focus is devoted to its implementation, using the JADE agent development framework, and its operation under different scenarios.