A middleware model in alloy for supply chain-wide agent interactions

To support the complex coordination activities involved in supply chain management, more and more companies have autonomous software agents acting on their behalf. Due to confidentiality concerns, such as hiding sensitive information from competitors, agents typically only have a local view on the supply chain. In many situations, however, companies would like to expand the view of their agents to share valuable information such as transportation tracking and service delays. Non of the participating companies, however, has enough knowledge or authority to realize such interactions in a controlled manner. In this paper, we present an organization middleware that offers a collaboration platform and enables agents to interact across the boundary of local interactions. Policies and laws enable companies to define the scope of interactions of their agents and the restrictions on their exposed information. Using Alloy, we formally define the relation between the interactions offered by the middleware, the exposed information and the provided policies and laws. This allows us to guarantee a number properties which are of particular interest to companies using the middleware