Service-oriented computing as a concept for providing interoperability and flexibility within heterogeneous environments has gained much attention within the last few years. Dynamically integrating external Web services into enterprise applications requires automatic contracting between service requestors and providers and automatic contract monitoring. This paper suggests a semi-automatic appr...

This paper introduces a contract-driven resource management process and supporting middleware framework. We aim at supporting mobile computing tasks as they appear in the areas of Ambient Intelligence (AmI). As available resources in AmI environments fluctuate frequently, the resource usage of AmI tasks must be extremely flexible. The presented component based methodology permits an optimal fle...

Because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. In competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which the agents can come to reach an agreement. Contract net protocols are one of the wellknown negotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. In contract net proto...

The Contract Net Protocol is a task allocation protocol that facilitates negotiation between bidders and an auctioneer in a MultiAgent System to form a contract. The extension allows the bidders to interact with more than one auctioneer concurrently, and to update their bids until a bid is granted. This introduces flexibility and ensures better selection of a bid. In this paper, we model the Co...

It is common for a retailer to sell products from competing manufacturers. How then should the …rms manage their contract negotiations? The supply chain coordination literature focuses either on a single manufacturer selling to a single retailer or one manufacturer selling to many (possibly competing) retailers. We …nd that some key conclusions from those market structures do not apply in our s...

The Semantic Web aims at automating Web content understanding and user request satisfaction. Intelligent agents assist towards this by performing complex actions on behalf of their users into real-life applications, such as e-Contracts, which make transactions simple by modeling the processes involved. This paper, presents a policy-based workflow methodology for efficient contract agreement amo...

Options contracts can provide trading partners with enhanced flexibility to respond to uncertain market conditions and allow for superior capacity planning thanks to early information on future demand. We develop an analytical framework to value options on capacity for production of non-storable goods or dated services. The market set-up is as follows: During the contract market, period 0, the ...

This paper demonstrates that an important role of intermediaries in supply chains is to reduce the ®nancial risk faced by retailers. It is well known that risk averse retailers when faced by the classical single-period inventory (newsvendor) problem will order less than the expected value maximizing (newsboy) quantity. We show that in such situations a risk neutral distributor can o€er a menu o...

We study how flexibility in workforce capacity can be used to efficiently match capacity and demand. Flexibility in workforce capacity is introduced by the annualized hours regime. Annualized hours allow organizations to measure working time per year, instead of per month or per week. An additional source of flexibility is hiring employees with different contract types, like full-time, part-tim...