Automating Decisions for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration Management

The current trend towards networked business forces enterprises to enter federated, loosely-coupled business networks, since much of the competition takes place between networks and value nets. The Pilarcos architecture provides solutions for B2B interoperability middleware to support various kinds of collaboration and cooperation networks by business service discovery and selection, interoperability management support, eContracting support, and reputation-based trust management support. A complementary aspect of high importance is the decision-making within the eContracting process, i.e. decision-making on whether the suggested network is strategically interesting, whether the provided and expected services in the network are feasible, and whether there is sufficient trust to the gained benefits over the risks. The ultimate goal is to create an expert system to support decision-making at the autonomous enterprises for managing the agile collaborations.