An Agent Based Inter-organizational Collaboration Framework: OperA+

Inter-organizational collaboration often occurs in complex, dynamic and unpredictable environments. Regulating structures should be represented explicitly and independently from the acting components at different levels of abstraction in order for stakeholders to be able to analyze the overall setup and decide on their participation. This paper proposes a framework for describing collaboration relationships in inter-organizational partnerships. The framework is based on the OperA model for multi-agent organizations and provides a specification dimension which describes what to do from the designer´s perspective based on the concept of organization, role and role dependency, and an enactment dimension which represents the agents and their role enacting relationships to describe who does what from an implementation perspective. The adoption of composite roles and composite agents facilitates a modeling of nested organizations, which offers a suitable way to manage/regulate inter-organizational interactions.