Automatic formation and analysis of multi-agent virtual organization

Virtual organization refers to the temporary team-ing of enterprises. By sharing physical, human and knowl-edge resources via information technologies, a virtual or-ganization 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 op-erate virtual enterprise is very important. The paper de-scribes our experience gained by implementing a multi-agent system that simulates an artificial marketplace, for which we have derived several decision-making mecha-nisms in various stages of a virtual organization. We pre-sented a negotiation protocol and a bid selection algo-rithm 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 under-stand the organizational problem, we adapted a statisti-cal 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