Behavior Modeling in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organizations (VO) consist of a group of agents (individuals, enterprises, or intelligent machines) that collaborate towards achieving some common goals. Partners of the VO are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in working together. While behaving collaboratively facilitates both performing the joint tasks and achieving the common goals of the VO, frictional behavior even if demonstrated by a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to define a suitable framework to be able to model and analyze the partners' behaviors. However, on one hand the VO contracts usually address partners' tasks at the high level only, and on the other hand VOs are dynamic and continuously evolving. Consequently, contract terms do not sufficiently define the detailed daily activities of partners. Rather, partners in the VO perform their daily activities according to the detailed set of tasks planned and agreed together with the VO coordinator. Nevertheless, partners' daily activities comply with the commitments they have made once in their written contracts. This paper introduces a framework in which promises are incrementally made by the agents, to indicate their detailed agreements on the daily tasks to perform, and in turn promises and their fulfillments formalize the VO partners' behavior.