Agent-based brokerage for virtual enterprise creation in the moulds industry

Brokerage and partners search is an important activity in the creation phase of a virtual enterprise (VE), where the most adequate consortium of enterprises should be selected to respond to a given business opportunity obtained by a broker. This paper proposes a multi-agent-based architecture to support this functionality in the context of a cluster of twelve enterprises in the moulds and die sector. The system includes a broker agent, a facilitator and consortium agents that plan the possible VEs, and a set of agents representing the enterprises participating in the cluster. The contract-net protocol is used to collect bids from cluster members and to select the most adequate ones. In case the cluster does not cover all the requirements a more general search for partners can be performed on Internet-based directories of enterprises.