Enabling Cooperation in an Inter-cloud Environment: An Agent-Based Approach

Cooperation always contains some control flow. This control flow can be treated by workflow models in order to coordinate actions of a group of distributed participants. While centralized intra-organizational workflow management systems are nowadays very well understood and implemented via tools, the idea of inter-organizational workflow management systems (IOWfMS) still needs conceptual and technical support. This paper discusses the use of agents and multi-agents as underlying concepts of such systems on the basis of agent- and organization-oriented Petri nets. Powerful modeling concepts need appropriate powerful constructs in modeling languages and their tools. As an overall solution we provide Inter-Cloud Workflow Petri Nets (IC-WPN) and sketch their technical embedding. They combine central conceptual ideas of systems-within-systems models, WfMS, as well as agent and organization theories with technical solutions from agent and Cloud technology.