Dealing with interoperability: An agent-oriented perspective

In Today´s enterprises operate in a dynamic environment which is characterized by global outsourcing, shrinking product life-cycles, and unstable demand. To prosper in this environment, enterprises face a growing need to share information and to collaborate with each other at all levels of the value chain. As organizations are gradually transforming into “networked organizations”, interoperability becomes the main challenge to realize the vision of seamless business interaction across organizational boundaries. The article presents three basic concepts investigated in the research area of agent-based and multiagent systems: communication, modelling, and services. These concepts are likely to play an important part with respect to deal with interoperability problems in the context of business applications. The article claims that a methodology that is based on such basic concepts needs to be developed to deal with the problems of interoperability in the long run.