Multi agent enterprise modeling

The advent of information technology has made today's enterprises increasingly distributed. To stay competitive organizations of today have to manage the different components of their technology by integrating and coordinating them into a highly efficient, effective, and responsive system. Rather than dealing with each component individually, it is necessary to have a new paradigm for management of enterprise systems, so that all the components and their operations can be managed in an integrated fashion. The multi-agent framework presented in this paper is such a paradigm for achieving enterprise integration. We specifically emphasize the coordination mechanisms needed for ensuring the orderly operations and concerted decision making among the components - i.e., agents of an enterprise.