Adding intelligent agents to existing EI frameworks

The global marketplace and the Internet have served as catalysts for enterprise integration (EI), both within a company and between a company and its suppliers and partners. EI software architectures, or frameworks, are often built on top of standard middleware and typically lack the ability to function in dynamic environments where flexibility, adaptability, and knowledge management are crucial. Furthermore, they do not scale well to wide-area enterprises that extend across organizational boundaries. These frameworks nevertheless offer a cost-effective basis for resource management, user coordination, knowledge exchange, and information extraction in a virtual enterprise. The paper considers how, by incorporating agents with their inherently distributed characteristics of autonomy, reasoning or intelligence, and goal-driven behavior, existing EI frameworks can be enhanced to support adaptive virtual enterprises