Research on a Holonic Agent-Based Inter-Organizational Collaborative Business Model

Summary form only given. The development of Internet and mobile communications provides companies with more opportunities to conduct business. Most companies work through collaborative business (c-business) with their partners via the Internet and mobile terminals. This indicates a need to explore new information system design methods to support such business activities. This paper analyzes the limitations of the main technologies and methods of system design used in traditional e-business. The traditional design methods of information systems cannot meet current needs, but a distributed and inter-platform computing architecture, utilizing CORBA, enterprise Java beans (EJB) and holonic agents, gives us a new way to handle the problem. The paper proposes a model based on these technologies, which can carry out negotiations and information interactions between companies via collaboration components or objects. A holonic agent-based collaborative model provides better security and flexibility, and improves the performance of inter-organizational cooperation. Based on this model, the company and its partners or customers can implement online collaboration easily. An example is included that shows the usability of the model.