Agent-based service-oriented collaborative architecture for value chains of SMEs

Current ICT trends provide new opportunities to implement some well-known models of e-collaboration between business partners, namely virtual organizations. The orientation towards enterprise social computing naturally complements the way companies do business with each other, thus the new service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 based solutions can help to develop systems better suited for modern business needs. This paper presents an architecture based on SOA and Intelligent agents, which is aimed to address the needs of European SMEs involved in ERP software business. The solution is based on the concept of digital business ecosystem, an environment and software infrastructure, which can help a community of potential business partners to establish and maintain valuable business relationships. Such ecosystem provides its members with value-added services like reputation management, peer-to-peer negotiation of business terms and flexible partner search through usage of Intelligent Agents technology in overall SOA-based framework.