A Context-aware Inter-organizational Collaboration Model Applied to International Trade1

With the development of international trade, collaborative organizations are involved in the value chain to accomplish their cooperative goals. Business organizations try to operate as efficiently as possible while governmental organizations have to regulate business performance. Governmental regulation of multi-organization alliances is not only complex but also time-consuming. Hence, interactions between business and governmental organizations is changing from monolithic control by regulatory authorities to distributed environments where private enterprises are free to regulate their affairs within the boundaries set by the regulatory authorities. The former way of controlling is called direct control and the latter is named self-regulation. In order to determine the effects and possibilities of different approaches for direct control and self-regulation, a careful analysis is required to make sure that integrated business processes are performed in a secure and smooth way. To this end, based on an existing agent based organization modeling approach OperA [1], we propose a framework that enables modeling and comparisons between different interorganizational collaborative approaches.