Vision

Services and Service Oriented Architectures promise to enable dynamic business networks. However, the emergence of such networks is hindered by the complexity of orchestration of inter-organizational services.

Current integration technologies are too static to enable intelligent coordination.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been designed in laboratory settings for a number of years.

In theory, they offer several advantages over traditional business integration technology, such as being more adaptive, self-learning and offering a better fit to a decentralized organizational setting.

As information services become more open through the web and SOA, we believe that multi-agent technology is ready to leave the lab and enter the field.

But, both organizational and technical issues need to be addressed for successful implementation of MAS in practice. Our research is focused on identifying these issues and resolution strategies. How should MAS be designed and successfully implemented?

This is the central research questions that we address in several projects we are engaged in, jointly with industry and partner university research groups.