A Distributed Agent Based System For Supporting Virtual Software Corporations

Virtual Software Corporations (VSCs) are a novel organisational form that use the competitive advantage provided by access to scarce competencies and economies of scale in software development. The main feature of a VSC is the distributed and temporary nature of the teams involved and the use of communication and information technology to support its activities. Large-scale software developments have always involved significant co-operative work and have been supported by automated process support environments, which help manage and support the associated workflow activities. However, VSCs are characterised by significantly more dynamic processes which cannot be adequately supported by current process modelling representation and enactment systems. Here we present a distribute multi-agent system using a deontic logic based formalism to model the commitments of process actors in VSCs. The actions performed in a VSC are captured using this formalism and support for specific co-ordination issues identified by the case study of a real-life VSC is provided. We demonstrate how this distributed multi-agent system can support the dynamic nature of the executable process model of VSCs.