Supporting Virtual Organisations Using BDI Agents and Constraints

Virtual organisations underpin many important activities in distributed computing, including e-commerce and e-science. This paper describes a new technique by which software agents can intelligently form virtual organisations to meet some pre-specified requirements. Our approach builds on work in BDI agents and constraint satisfaction techniques. Using a realistic service-providing scenario, we show how an agent can use constraint solving techniques to explore possible virtual organisation alliances with other agents, based on its beliefs and desires. The agent can choose the best among several possible virtual organisations to form in order to meet a customer’s requirements. Our approach is to use a deliberative process to construct possible worlds, each corresponding to a potential virtual organisation, and each configured using constraint satisfaction techniques. We also show how an agent can take account of pre-existing virtual organisation relationships in its deliberations.