Multi-agent Oriented Policy-based Management System for Virtual Enterprise

摘要

Virtual enterprise is a temporary organizationconsists of some independent enterprises, aiming to sharetechnology, cost and other resource. It is predicted to be themost important business organizational patterns in the 21stcentury. To up speed the development of virtual enterprise,this paper presented a policy-based multi-agentmanagement system to simulate the manipulation of virtualenterprise. Firstly, a hierarchical policy specification isproposed to control the behavior of agent. Secondly, thedetection algorithms and resolution strategies are describedfor the conflicts that may be brought about by hierarchicalpolicy. Thirdly, a policy admin tool to simplify theoperations of policies is presented. Each enterpriseregistered in this tool is assigned an agent; policies made byenterprises are executed by agents correspondingly.Subdivision of application level and representation scope ofpolicy leads to that policy-based mechanism not onlyprovides good system control on autonomy agents, but alsoensures the flexibility of agents; and gives the solution forpolicy conflicts at the same time. Finally, the maincharacteristics of this system are discussed by an example.