College of Information Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, China

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Abstract—Virtual enterprise is a temporary organization consists of some independent enterprises, aiming to share technology, cost and other resource. It is predicted to be the most important business organizational patterns in the 21st century. To up speed the development of virtual enterprise, this paper presented a policy-based multi-agent management system to simulate the manipulation of virtual enterprise. Firstly, a hierarchical policy specification is proposed to control the behavior of agent. Secondly, the detection algorithms and resolution strategies are described for the conflicts that may be brought about by hierarchical policy. Thirdly, a policy admin tool to simplify the operations of policies is presented. Each enterprise registered in this tool is assigned an agent; policies made by enterprises are executed by agents correspondingly. Subdivision of application level and representation scope of policy leads to that policy-based mechanism not only provides good system control on autonomy agents, but also ensures the flexibility of agents; and gives the solution for policy conflicts at the same time. Finally, the main characteristics of this system are discussed by an example.

Index Terms—virtual enterprise, hierarchical policy specification, multi-agent system, policy conflict

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Cite: Jun Hu, Yinghui Song, and Ye Sun, "Multi-agent Oriented Policy-based Management System for Virtual Enterprise," Journal of Software vol. 7, no. 10, pp. 2357-2364 , 2012.