Agent Technologies in Virtual Enterprises

Decreasing innovation cycles, changing market situations as well as growing spe-cialisation in individual market segments demand new ways of economic thinking, increasingly forcing enterprises into cooperations, sometimes even with direct competitors. Presently discussed and designated as the corporate and cooperation model of the future is the so-called virtual enterprise. In this paper, we advocate the use of intelligent agents as a useful metaphor and as a software engineering methodology for the design and the operation of virtual enterprises. We focus on how agents can support the management of virtual enterprises through the Internet by performing tasks such as negotiation, information retrieval and extraction, and the participation in in electronic markets. This paper does not describe completed research. It rather ooers a perspective of the high potential of agent-based technology for one of tomorrow's key industrial areas.