ARTICLE IN PRESS

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing 23 (2007) 315–325

www.elsevier.com/locate/rcim

An agent-based service-oriented integration architecture for

collaborative intelligent manufacturing
Weiming Shena,, Qi Haoa, Shuying Wanga, Yinsheng Lia,b, Hamada Ghenniwac
a
Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute, National Research Council Canada, 800 Collip Circle, London, Ont., Canada N6G 4X8
b
Software School, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433 PR China
c
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont. Canada. N6A 5B9

Abstract

The rapidly changing needs and opportunities of today’s global market require unprecedented levels of interoperability to integrate
diverse information systems to share knowledge and collaborate among organizations. The combination of Web services and software
agents provides a promising computing paradigm for efficient service selection and integration of inter-organizational business processes.
This paper proposes an agent-based service-oriented integration architecture to leverage manufacturing scheduling services on a network
of virtual enterprises. A unique property of this approach is that the scheduling process of an order is orchestrated on the Internet
through the negotiation among agent-based Web services. A software prototype system has been implemented for inter-enterprise
manufacturing resource sharing. It demonstrates how the proposed service-oriented integration architecture can be used to establish a
collaborative environment that provides dynamic resource scheduling services.
r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Enterprise collaboration; Virtual enterprise; Software agents; Web services; Service-oriented architecture

1. Introduction whole can be more robust and agile to the transient market
opportunities.
The manufacturing enterprises of the 21st century are Toward this direction, enterprises all realize the cost of
facing an environment where markets are frequently automating cross-organizational transactions is very high,
shifting, new technologies are continuously emerging, and especially for the dynamic VE processes automation. In
competition is globally increasing. The rapidly changing view of the fact that distributed organizations are generally
needs and opportunities of today’s global market require managed using heterogeneous software systems running on
unprecedented levels of interoperability to integrate diverse heterogeneous computing environments, the recently
information systems to share knowledge and collaborate emerged Web Services technology provides a higher-level
among organizations. Fully integrated enterprises are being interoperability for leveraging business activities across the
replaced by business networks in which each participant Web either within an enterprise or among collaborating
provides others with specialized services. Traditional IT enterprises. Manufacturing firms have been putting their
infrastructures in which applications were managed and efforts to provide practical access methods to their existing
owned by one enterprise are being switched to networks of information systems by leveraging the Internet and Web.
applications owned and managed by many business However, what they have done today always assumes a
partners. Through this revolution, the temporary alliance collaboration network under a pre-assumed agreement. On
of enterprises (so-called Virtual Enterprise, or VE) as a the other hand, pure Web-based technologies, including
Web services, cannot fulfill the needs of VE applications,
particularly in that: (1) the Web service discovery mechan-
Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 519 430 7134; fax: +1 519 430 7064. ism is not enough for driving VE creation at run time; (2)
E-mail address: Weiming.Shen@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca (W. Shen). the Web service description is not enough for driving VE

0736-5845/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.rcim.2006.02.009
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services description that is semantically intensive; and (3) transactions or processes that are subject to norms or
the Web services business processes description, orchestra- protocols specified for certain business domains. Services
tion, and security have hardly reached a maturity for are thereby orchestrated vertically within one environment,
process automation [1,2]. or horizontally across multiple environments. As a result,
Intelligent software agents, which have been applied to an individual environment streamlines services in terms of
enterprise integration for wrapping legacy systems, not internal transactions while restrains its function scope to be
only provide an approach for functional integration, but highly specific to the targeted user group. Multiple
also promote business intelligence and collaboration environments collaborate in order to extend their business
among enterprises for their inherited characteristics of chains. Web services have been supported by major IT
communication, interaction, cooperation, pro-activeness, vendors through their commercial platforms such as
and autonomous intelligent decision making. We believe Microsoft’s .NET [3] and SUN’s J2EE [4]. There are also
that the combination of Web services and software agents underlying technologies behind the promoted business
provides a promising computing paradigm for efficient initiatives such as HP’s Adaptive Enterprise [5] and IBM’s
service selection and integration of inter-organizational On-Demand e-Business [6].
business processes. This paper proposes an agent-based To support the SOC concepts, Web services must
service-oriented integration architecture, wherein enter- provide standards-based definitions of an interoperability
prise Web services are dynamically orchestrated on the communication protocol, mechanisms for service descrip-
Internet using agent behaviors built in them. A prototype tion and discovery, approaches for service composition and
system is designed to demonstrate the VE creation process orchestration, as well as a basic set of mechanisms for
in response to a resource requirement order. quality of service. The first initiatives of Web services and
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 today’s de-fasco standards include SOAP [7], WSDL [8]
provides an introduction and analysis of Web services, and UDDI [9]. These standards together provide an open
software agents, and their applications to enterprise XML-based mechanism for application interoperability,
integration; Section 3 discusses the requirements of VE service description and service discovery. In recent years,
collaboration faced by manufacturing enterprises and the standardization initiatives have been very active in the
addresses the integration of software agents and Web Web services community to push basic Web services
services technologies; Section 4 presents an agent-based mechanisms to business applications. Among them, most
service-oriented system architecture for manufacturing notably are the Business Process Execution Language for
enterprises collaboration; Section 5 describes a case study Web Services (BPEL4WS) [10] and ebXML (Electronic
on virtual enterprise creation in response to a customer’s Business XML) [11] for service composition and orchestra-
order; Section 6 depicts an implemented software proto- tion; WS-Transaction [12] and WS-Coordination [13] for
type for inter-enterprise manufacturing resource sharing; service processes interaction; and other special protocols
Section 7 concludes the paper with some perspectives. related to security, service quality and business policies,
e.g., WS-Trust [14], WS-SecureConversation [15], WS-
2. Service-oriented computing and software agents Security [16], WS-SecurityPolicy [17], WS-Policy [18], and
WS-ReliableMessage [19]. Fig. 1 shows a classification of
Service-oriented computing (SOC) is considered as a new the Web services standards mentioned above. Note that
computing paradigm after the object-oriented paradigm. It this figure does not intend to show all available Web
utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing services standards. In fact, more standards are still being
applications/solutions. Services are autonomous platform- proposed and developed.
independent computational elements that can be described, J2EE and .NET are two widely accepted industrial
published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using application development frameworks for Web services.
XML for the purpose of developing massively distributed
interoperable applications.

2.1. Service-oriented computing and Web services Business

BPEL4WS
Processes
Web services technology is part of the SOC paradigm
WSDL, Policy, UDDI, Inspection Description
and can be considered as an implementation of the SOC
model. Web services are featured with application, plat- Reliable
Transactions
Quality of
form and provider independence. They provide an appro- Security
Messaging Service
Coordination
priate paradigm for building open large-scale application
environments, such as supply chains. In such environ- SOAP (Logical Messaging) Other protocols Transport
ments, services are not treated as isolated and one-time Other Services and
XML, Encoding
Encoding
affairs but rather as elements of an interactive, dynamic
and collaborative architecture. Service collaboration within
or across environments is modeled in terms of supported Fig. 1. Classification of Web services standards.
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They support Web services protocols such as UDDI, The basic components of an agent usually include
SOAP, WSDL and BPEL4WS. A number of integrated problem-solving, interaction, and communication compo-
development platforms such as IBM’s WebSphere [20] and nents. A particular arrangement (or instance) derived by
Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET [21] implement the two basic agent components reflects the pattern of the agent’s
frameworks. Web services have achieved a number of mental state as well as its reasoning rationale for achieving
successes at the application level, especially in e-Business its goals. In a distributed context, e.g., collaborative
applications: several examples are listed for .NET based manufacturing, such agents play different roles (or provide
Web services [22]; Sun Microsystems has helped Ford different services) and are able to coordinate, cooperate
Financial to design and build a platform infrastructure and possibly compete with other agents including human
based on the J2EE framework [23]; Amazon.com Inc. and beings. Significant efforts in software agents have yielded
Google have given developers and owners the ability to well-developed agent models and interaction protocols.
build applications and tools using their Web services APIs. The foundation for intelligent physical agents (FIPA) [30]
Web services have had quick evolution and broad has been focusing on developing specifications for agent
acceptance. However, there are still a number of issues communication, interaction and management.
that limit the applications of Web services in industry. Many researchers have been probing into agent-based
Current Web services technologies lack semantic descrip- solutions for enterprise integration and some reached the
tion and generic service model. Petrie et al. [1] also states conclusion that the agent technology provides a natural
that the standards such as UDDI and WSDL are far from way to realize enterprise integration effectively. Agent-
enough for automated service searching, discovery and based enterprise integration has been a very active research
composition. They discussed shortcomings of Web services area during the past ten years. In addition to significant
standards through some Web searching examples and academic researches, some projects have attracted active
reached the conclusion that these standards are in short of industrial participation and developed industrial applica-
semantics to understand the terms in XML structure. tions [31–33]. In most projects, software agents are used to
Without a common semantic model, a service-oriented encapsulate existing legacy software systems using various
framework has no foundation to facilitate Web services middleware approaches [34,35]. A detailed review on
implementation. Current Web services technologies have applications of agent technology to manufacturing in
not incorporated enough semantics in their profile and general can be found in [36].
representation. For example, UDDI is a profile-based However, most of the above mentioned agent-based
protocol for registration and search, and it only relies on approaches for business integration across or within
pre-defined keywords. WSDL needs additional informa- enterprise boundaries are demonstrated only through
tion for ad hoc and automatic discovery of services. experiments or prototypes developed in research labs using
BPEL4WS is capable of supporting runtime semantics proprietary agent technologies. Generally speaking, unlike
based on its logical operations and representation. How- Web and Web services technologies, there is a lack of
ever, BPEL4WS is not based on a formal semantics industrial support on the development and deployment of
description. In order to address this issue, several research practical agent applications.
efforts have been devoted to bringing semantics into Web
services [2,24–26]. W3C’s answer is OWL [27] based on 3. Integration of web services and software agents
DAML+OIL [28]. W3C/DARPA DAML-S [29] (recently
being replaced by OWL-S) is another example of resulting A major objective of the Web services paradigm is to
semantic Web services markup languages, though it could support enterprise collaboration to reach a higher level of
be too ‘‘heavyweight’’ to industrial applications. However, distributed and reconfigurable business integration. Cur-
no methodologies of these semantic Web approaches have rent efforts have been focused on Web services choreo-
been developed yet, particularly, because they are based on graphy and orchestration. The applied approaches, such as
current UDDI’s T-Model mechanism, they can only WS-Transaction and BPEL4WS, are mainly originated
describes pre-conditions and effects of the whole Web from traditional top-down workflow principles, where Web
services, but not of the individual operations. services are not treated as autonomous entities. However,
the top-down ethics of the Web services business orches-
tration has the following limitations, in the same way as
2.2. Software agents and enterprise integration other kinds of workflow based business process manage-
ment approaches:
Under the context of this paper, we view an ‘‘agent’’ as a
metaphorical conceptualization tool at a high level of  Dynamic business formation and effective selection of
abstraction (knowledge level) that captures, supports, and services. A coalition of collaborating enterprises (i.e., a
implements features that are useful for distributed compu- virtual enterprise or VE) is generated by a collection of
tation in open environments. In our view, an agent is an selected Web services. Web services are created ‘‘on the
individual collection of primitive components that provide fly’’ and it may be beyond human capabilities to analyze
a focused and cohesive set of capabilities. the required services and select them manually. A kind
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of brokering service provided by agent technologies is Web services in that they are functional entities, instead of
required for the creation and operation of a virtual simple interaction delegations or communication proxies.
enterprise. The idea is to exploit agents’ capabilities of proactive
 Service dynamic composition. Once the participants and interactions to enhance Web services’ behaviors. With such
their services are confirmed to join a VE, the services are a computing paradigm, software components, each repre-
required to be compiled dynamically according to senting both a service and an agent, cooperatively or
predefined abstract business rules so that a business competitively interact to provide unified services in a
process can be carried out upon the VE. For example, in specified environment, such as brokering, pricing and
an ordering process, the generic workflow can be negotiation in an e-marketplace, as well as cross-enterprise
described as receiving an order, composition of a VE environments, such as integration and cooperation in a
to satisfy the order, contract generation, and contract virtual enterprise. This is aligned well with Huhns and
confirmation. The fixed pattern of business processes Singh’s prediction [37] ‘‘agents will become an essential part
described by BPEL4WS cannot meet the requirements of most Web-based applications, serving as the ‘glue’ that
of collaborative manufacturing, where dynamic con- makes a system as large as the Web manageable and viable.’’
sortiums of manufacturing enterprises are formed ‘‘on The purpose of the combination solution is to integrate
the fly’’ by negotiations or trust in order to catch the software agents and Web services technologies into a
transient market opportunities. cohesive entity that attempts to avoid the weaknesses of
 Flexible cooperation strategies. The dynamic character- each individual technology, while reinforcing their indivi-
istics of business collaboration generally require the dual strengths [24]. The merging of service-oriented and
introduction of flexible cooperation strategies in the agent-based approaches has been a hot topic of research in
consortium formation processes, moreover, in the recent years. Petrie et al. [1] discussed the shortcomings of
coordination of operations of a formed consortium, Web services standards and how logical AI techniques like
and the re-negotiation processes to adjust a current declarative commands, agents, and planning can be used to
consortium under certain circumstances. The behaviors address some of these shortcomings. They proposed a FX-
revealed by the defined business workflow can be Agent approach to address Web services discovery and
predicted because of the explicit descriptions of roles, composition of Web services. Matskin et al. [40] identified
nodes (services), control patterns (service sequences and Web services composition as an important issue for
control logics), invocation interfaces (WSDL descrip- efficient selection and integration of inter-organizational
tions), and the data transferring among services. and heterogeneous services on the Web and they believed
 Semantic and ontology problem. Resulting from the that software agents can help make Web services ‘‘pro-
uncertainties of the dynamic enterprise collaboration, active’’. In their system, provider’s Web services are
semantic and ontology problem in service orchestration wrapped into individual providers’ agents on an agent-
is inevitable. This problem is proposed by some based marketplace providing services for customers’
researchers in inter-enterprise business workflow initia- agents. Maamar et al. [41] presented an agent-based and
tives [37–39]. However, more complicated situations context-oriented approach that supports the composition
arise with the introduction of flexible participants and of Web services. During service composition process,
flexible cooperation strategies into a cooperation pro- software agents engage in conversations with their peers
cess. According to our knowledge, none of the current to agree on the Web services that participate in this
workflow patterns or Web service process flow definition process. Liu et al. [42] proposed a conceptual model of
languages is able to handle such complex situations. agent-mediated Web services for intelligent service match-
Semantic and ontology in workflow has to be enriched making. In fact, most of research efforts in the literature
or evolved because data exchange, information flow as like above mentioned approaches can be roughly categor-
well as logistics are more critical factors to practical ized in to ‘‘agentification’’ of Web services into an agent
business integration than the workflow description and community. We proposed a different approach for agent
workflow engine itself. and Web services integration [24]. In our agent-based Web
services (AWS) framework, an agent core is built into each
Software agents have been proved to handle sophisti- Web service, so that a Web service is itself an agent. No
cated interaction patterns. Agent-orientation is an appro- matter the agentification of Web services as agents in a
priate design paradigm to enable automatic and dynamic multi-agent system [41] or encapsulation of agents as Web
collaborations, especially for e-Business systems with services over the Internet [24], both approaches share the
complex and distributed transactions. In services realiza- common goal that, by taking the advantages of Web
tion, software agents are very essential for the provision of services and agents, the resultant integrated solution will
a focused and cohesive set of active capabilities. Therefore, produce a sophisticated paradigm for Internet computing.
we envisage a combination of agent and Web services There is an interesting industrial movement toward
technologies and strongly believe that we are on the right this direction, as reported in a recent technical report
track towards an evolution of current SOC paradigm. on Web service architecture [43]. W3C introduced a
Software agents can be one of the essential evolvements of similar concept, where software agents are treated as the
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foundation for Web services architecture. In this model, negotiate bids with upper mediating agents. Moreover,
software agents are not used for service communication upper mediating agents are also implemented as a network
front ends or as proxies, rather, they are treated as basic of AWS on the Internet. The integration of software agents
entities that encapsulate Web services—‘‘A Web service is and Web services can be proposed at both the design level
an abstract notion that must be implemented by a concrete and the implementation level. At the design level, we
agent.’’ Agent orientation for software construction and encapsulate Web services as agent models so that each
semantics-based interaction can be effectively applied for agent functions on behalf of a Web service in its action and
Web services applications. However, the definition of an relation to the environment. In this sense, we can treat a
agent by W3C under the context of Web Services Web service as a semi-autonomous agent. On the other
Architecture is a specialization of the definition in hand, Web services can be used to describe the external
architecture of the Web: ‘‘an agent is a program acting on behaviors of software agents. Therefore, agents can be
behalf of a person or an organization.’’ used to build high-level models with flexible interaction
patterns, while Web services are more suitable for solving
interoperability problem of various applications in real
4. An agent-based service-oriented integration architecture implementations. At the implementation level, UDDI,
WSDL and SOAP provide such capacities as discovery,
We envision a Web service-based environment as a deployment and communication, while specifications such
collection of economically motivated agent-based Web as BPEL4WS provide service composition and process
services. Software agents are dynamically implemented as enactment.
services with different functionalities and roles. In fact, the Major components of the proposed system are described
dynamic agent-based behavior model plus the Web service- as follows:
based interoperable protocols can generate a flexible,
reconfigurable and coordinated approach to perform  Web portal is a Web interface that is designed for users
business process management both across enterprises and to access and manage related information. From the
within an enterprise. Web portal, the customers register their profiles, place
The agent-based service-oriented architecture for manu- orders, select bids, and manage the contract informa-
facturing enterprise collaboration is illustrated in Fig. 2. In tion.
this system, each enterprise provides a number of Web  Workflow planner is a software agent that is responsible
services registered in the UDDI repository. The Web for coordinating the workflow process. The workflow
services are implemented by the AWS [24] technology with planner includes a workflow engine. When a workflow
a built-in agent core. So, enterprises are given the ability to process is triggered, the workflow planner selects a

Fig. 2. The agent-based service-oriented system architecture for enterprise collaboration.

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related workflow definition from process definition services, and return this matching list to the broker
repository. According to the defined relations and agent. An ontology agent may have advanced learning
properties, the workflow engine within the workflow abilities in order to gather non-functional information
planner finds an execution task and then sends it to the of services on the fly, such as QoS (Quality of Service).
broker agent for task allocation.  Interface agent performs functions as an application
 Broker agent plays an important role in coordinating the gateway that is a joint point of the inter-enterprise
AWS. In our system, the broker agent performs four system and the intra-enterprise system. Its functions
actions: order generation, partner filtering, bid negotia- include transferring messages, receiving tasks, returning
tion, and contracting. As shown in Fig. 2, after the order order bids, and controlling access security. When the
is submitted, the broker agent needs to query the supplier’s Web service receives a message, it is trans-
workflow planner for an execution task and then ask ferred to the interface agent first. The content of SOAP
ontology agent for a list of related supplier agents to message is deprived, checked and directed to the
execute the task. responsible agent.
 Supplier agent is an agent on behalf of an enterprise that  Mediator agent is a coordination agent at the enterprise
has capabilities of providing certain services such as level that communicates with resource agents to perform
manufacturing, shipment or payment. A supplier agent task scheduling, task execution and execution process
registers its services to the UDDI registry, receives the monitoring. As shown in Fig. 3, when an order is
task execution request from the broker agent, schedules received, the mediator agent decomposes it as a set of
tasks using its internal agent-based scheduling system tasks and finds possible resource agents to complete
and fulfills the contract after the customer makes the these tasks. The resource scheduling is a negotiation
decision. process in that the mediator agent sends the bid request
 UDDI is a static repository that provides suppliers’ to resource agents and makes the decision after receiving
information with standard terms that contains enter- the bid results.
prise’s businesses, capabilities, relationships and con-  Resource agents represent enterprise’s internal re-
straints. sources such as legacy systems, software, machines,
 Ontology agent provides semantic integration services, and workers. Each resource agent is on behalf of
responds to service queries and performs ontology one resource. When a resource agent receives a call-for-
reasoning and match-making. In order for the ontology bid from a mediator agent, it will prepare a bid
agent to compare the requested capabilities with the according to its knowledge (including its capability,
advertised capabilities (by supplier agents), the re- schedule, status, and cost) and send a bid. Once the bid
quested and advertised capabilities must be formulated it proposes is awarded, the resource agent will commit to
in a way that they are comparable in terms of service the task by fixing its schedule and prepare for task
performance. In our system, when the broker agent execution.
submits a service query to the ontology agent, the  Directory Facilitator (DF) has the registration
ontology agent will check first its local service ontology service functionalities for other agents in the internal
repository then the UDDI registry, find the matching agent-based manufacturing scheduling system, keeps

Enterprise’s Web Service

Interface DF
Agent Agent

Mediator
Agent

Resource Resource Resource

Agent 1 Agent 2 Agent n

Database Database Database

Fig. 3. Agent-based scheduling within an enterprise.

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up-to-date agent registration, informs all registered Since the creation of a VE (during a customer’s ordering
agents with updated registry, and provides look-up process) is a composite business process that is made up
and matchmaking services to other agents within the dynamically by a set of individual services, workflow and
internal scheduling system. ontology issues must be considered in implementation. We
addressed these issues in details in a separate paper [45]
As shown in Figs. 2 and 3, the proposed system through a layered agent-based workflow concept, workflow
architecture is composed at two levels. At the inter- ontology and ontology reasoning mechanism. Here, major
enterprise level, communication among agents is based activities in the workflow are briefly presented for a better
on Web services standards and several Agent-based Web understanding of the case study.
Services are proposed such as workflow planner, broker Service ordering: The user places an order through a
agent, ontology agent and supplier agents, as well as two Web portal. A service order process is separated as a
other software entities (not agents): Web portal and UDDI sequence of order input, order generation, and order
registry. At the enterprise level, there is a FIPA-compliant submission. Once the order is submitted, for each
multi-agent system composed of a directory facilitator, an individual order, the broker agent needs to query the
interface agent, a mediator agent, and several resource workflow planner for task decomposition and workflow
agents. The FIPA Contract Net protocol [30] is used both instantiation. The workflow planner agent makes its
at the inter-enterprise collaboration level for the selection decision by workflow ontology reasoning from the abstract
of service providers and at the enterprise level for the workflow definition to the executable workflow definition.
allocation of manufacturing resources (see Fig. 3). Other When the broker agent gets an execution task, it tries to
Web services standards such as BPEL4WS will be adopted find a service agent to execute the task.
for further interactions/collaborations between business Partner search: The search and selection of business
partners. partners is a critical step in the formation of a virtual
enterprise. Partner search can be done based on following
resources: (1) private information resources such as the
5. Case study of inter-enterprise resource sharing local service registration list of the broker agent; (2)
ontology service registry at the ontology agent site; and (3)
We choose the inter-enterprise resource sharing [44] as public service registry such as a public UDDI repository. In
our case study to demonstrate the proposed agent-based fact, the partner search process is carried out by the broker
service-oriented architecture for enterprise collaboration. agent through checking sequentially the above three
In this case study, each enterprise is encapsulated as an resources with decreased priorities. The partner search
individual Web service on the Internet and it owns a result is a list of matching service agents that best serve the
number of expensive manufacturing resources that can be accomplishment of the identified task.
shared with other enterprises. A software prototype system Bidding process: After the broker agent recognizes the
(described in detail in the next section) has been potential service agents, it needs to negotiate with them for
implemented to demonstrate how manufacturing enter- cost estimation, production planning, and conflict resolu-
prises can dynamically establish a virtual enterprise in tion. The CNP (Contract Net Protocol) [46], commonly
response to a customer’s requests. The reasons why we used as an interaction protocol in a multi-agent commu-
choose to demonstrate this problem are based on the nity, is adopted for this inter-enterprise negotiation
following observations: process. A ‘‘Call-for-Bid’’ message initialized by the broker
agent is encoded using SOAP denotations and sent to all
 SMEs need to have focused competencies. potential service agents. Each service agent is required to
 Each of them owns a number of expensive manufactur- return a ‘‘Bid’’ to the broker agent. The broker then
ing resources. collects the return bids and feeds back related information
 SMEs would like to join a consortium in order to to the customer.
maximize their profit margins by increasing resource Partner selection: The decision of partner selection is
utilization as much as possible. made by the broker agent (in the case of an automatic
 An SME usually has limited funds and has to be very system) or the customer (in the case of an interactive
careful on investing in expensive manufacturing equip- system) after collecting all possible bids and checking
ment. with its decision rules. The most promising alternative
 SMEs specially need to cooperate so that they together for virtual enterprise partnership configuration is chosen
as a virtual enterprise can be competitive on business based on the service time, cost, quality, trust, and other
opportunities. factors.
 All SMEs are concerned with whether their proprietary Contracting: Contracting process is used to achieve a
information can be protected when collaborating with business agreement between the customer and the service
other companies over the Internet. suppliers. A contract is generated by the broker agent mainly
 The identity and integrity of an SME congregation can based on customer’s order, payment and shipping informa-
be recognized through the virtual world. tion as well as suppliers’ bid information. The customer
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keeps the contract and its copies are sent to the selected which is implemented also as a run-time workflow engine,
service agents (participant enterprises) for execution. has the functions of service discovery, coordination and
mediation. The broker agent contacts the ontology agent to
6. Prototype implementation get a list of potential supplier agents. Then the broker sends
out a ‘‘Call for Bid’’ to the potential supplier agents and
The Web portals and Web services are developed by Java since then, a collaboration/negotiation process based on
Web Services Development Pack (JWSDP) [47]. The the Contract Net Protocol is initiated and carried out
JWSDP provides a convenient all-in-one package for between the broker agent and three enterprise Web
developers who want to start building and deploying services. Each enterprise will submit a bid if its dynamic
application Web services quickly. scheduling service is able to allocate necessary manufactur-
In the implemented prototype, we assume three enter- ing resources to meet the requirements of the customer. As
prises (A, B, and C) participating in the virtual enterprise a result, a list of bids proposed by enterprises is fed back to
wishing to offer services to share their manufacturing the customer for decision making (Fig. 5). However, the
resources, say CNC, EDM or CMM machines. Each decision of bid selection and order contracting depends on
enterprise’s resource scheduling service is encapsulated in the choice made by the customer in the current implemen-
an individual agent-based Web service (AWS) on the tation.
Internet. Enterprise resource scheduling AWSs are pub- After the user makes his decisions on partner’s selection,
lished to a shared UDDI server. The broker agent may the broker dynamically builds up an executable process
query the UDDI for a list of enterprises and do simple flow for order enactment. Finally, a contract is generated
semantic matchmaking based on the resource capacities by the broker agent and its copies are sent to the selected
that an enterprise published in the UDDI. enterprise(s).
A Web portal is developed to connect all enterprises For each enterprise to respond to the ‘‘Call for Bid’’
represented by their Web services. For simplicity of from the broker with a bid, an agent-based manufacturing
implementation, functions of the workflow planner agent scheduling system (as shown in Fig. 3) is implemented
are combined into the broker agent. The user places an behind the enterprise AWS for dynamic scheduling of
order through the Web portal (Fig. 4). The broker agent, manufacturing resources (those expensive machines only).

Fig. 4. Snapshot of the order entry user interface.

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Fig. 5. Snapshot of the bid selection interface.

Fig. 6. Snapshot of agent-based scheduling system (within an enterprise).

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