An Application of an Expressive Coloured Petri Nets Modeling Methodology to a Business to Business Environment

The dynamic nature of cooperative agent environment makes considerably more difficult the task of modeling permanent interactions among agents. This problem becomes rather hard if more than two agents are involved. So far, traditional approaches deal with the problem of modeling interactions in static conditions and commonly with only two agents participating concurrently in cooperative tasks. The complex nature of such dynamic environments, such as e-business, demands to build adequate tools to manage multiple interactions with efficient expressiveness. This problem remains one of the most important challenges in cooperative multi-agents system research. In this paper, it is proposed an application of an efficient methodology based on Coloured Petri Nets to model multiple interactions, which takes into account the expressiveness as its most important property. The model was tested within a business to business (B2B) environment where concurrent interactions among buyers, suppliers and the marketplace constitute a dynamic process that need to be permanently monitored and controlled. This methodology provides great advantages in the representation and reasoning for the interaction mechanism modeled in cooperative information systems. The methodology integrates mainly: a) the action basic loop in order to represent the system interactions and to model organization conversations, b) the use of CPN for the interaction modeling and system simulation, c) the communicative acts of FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents), included in the Agent Communication Language Specification.