Title: The RBVO Formation Protocol

Authors: Jiri Vokrinek, Jiri Biba, Jiri Hodik, Jaromir Vybihal

Addresses: Agent Technology Center, Gerstner Laboratory, Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Technicka 2, 166 27 Prague, Czech Republic. ' Agent Technology Center, Gerstner Laboratory, Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Technicka 2, 166 27 Prague, Czech Republic. ' Agent Technology Center, Gerstner Laboratory, Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Technicka 2, 166 27 Prague, Czech Republic. ' Profinit, s.r.o., Tychonova 2, 160 00 Prague, Czech Republic

Abstract: The proposed protocol has been designed to support the flexible formation of Request-Based Virtual Organisations (RBVOs) with an emphasis on reflecting the conditions of real competitive environments. It supports automated or semi-automated negotiations mainly in the creation part of a Virtual Organisation (VO) life cycle and it accounts for the use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The protocol consists of three phases: (1) potential partner search, (2) negotiation of SLAs and the RBVO establishment, and (3) RBVO (execution and) dissolution. The protocol complies with Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) standards and it has been utilised in the multiagent prototype in a real industrial case. The prototype has been implemented on top of a web-service-based agent platform.

Keywords: negotiation; RBVO formation protocol; electronic business; e-business; web services; agent platforms; service level agreements; SLAs; request-based virtual organisations; potential partners; partner search; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2009.023634

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2009 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.135 - 162

Published online: 04 Mar 2009 *

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