Nowadays, virtual enterprise (VE) is a crucial paradigm of business management in an agile environment. VE exists in both service and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of each enterprise in a VE may vary greatly from industry to industry. Obviously, there is a need for a mechanism through which these different functions can be integrated together transparently. In this contribution, we focus on the negotiation process in VE formulation as a basic research to clarify its effective management in terms of partner search. Each enterprise in VE is defined as an agent with multiutilities, and a framework of multiagent programming with game theoretic approach is newly proposed as a negotiation algorithm among the agents. Each unit is defined as an agent in our VE model, and their decision making is formulated as a game theoretic methodology. We develop a computer simulation model to form VEs through multiple negotiations among several potential members in the negotiation domain, and finally clarify the formulation dynamism with the negotiation process.
Business Process Management System Modeling in the Virtual Enterprise Based on Stochastic Colored Petri Net