Crossing Organizational Boundaries with Mobile Agents in Electronic Service Markets

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Merz, M.^{; *} | Lamersdorf, W.

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Distributed Systems Group, Hamburg University, D-22527 Hamburg, Germany, E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Correspondence: [*] Correspondence to: Mr. Michael Merz.

Abstract: In today's network environments, a mismatch can be identified between existing, well-integrated distributed applications on one side and an increasing demand for spontaneous service access in electronic service markets on the other. In many cases, not only such buyer-seller relationships but also the management of distributed business procedures reaches beyond organizational boundaries. This often implies for most of the existing - tightly-integrated - workflow management applications that cooperating partners have to give up their local autonomy. However, emerging mobile agent platforms claim to provide suitable technical support to bridge this gap. To illustrate this approach, the COSM (Common Open Service Market) infrastructure is presented, which allows business applications to cooperate on one side but also to preserve their local autonomy on the other. Therefore, the mobile agent approach has been chosen for a exible market-oriented integration of commercial services on the basis of the COSM infrastructure. This article shows how the basic COSM infrastructure is extended towards mobile agent support. Finally, an example illustrates this extension in the application field of interorganizational workflow management.

DOI: 10.3233/ICA-1999-6201

Journal: Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 91-104, 1999