Using spheres of commitment to support virtual enterprises

Cooperative information systems (CISs) are multiagent systems geared toward heterogeneous and open information environments. Many applications-including, virtual enterprises (VEs)-require coordination of various autonomous information resources. Although preserving the autonomy of participating components is crucial, unrestrained autonomy would lead to chaos, and preclude robust behavior. A flexible formulation of commitments can provide a natural means through which autonomous agents may voluntarily constrain their behavior. We propose spheres of commitment (SoComs) to structure CISs explicitly based on the commitments of their components. SoComs (a) model the capabilities and capacities of agents, (b) allow commitments to be cancelable, and (c) incorporate social policies to handle the creation, satisfaction, and cancelation of commitments. By considering commitments explicitly, SoComs can represent truly open CISs whose composition can change dynamically. Importantly, our approach is "backwards-compatible." Traditional transactions and spheres of control (SoCs) correspond to special cases where the commitments are more rigidly structured. Traditional commitment-based approaches, while more flexible than transactions, only provide a fixed set of social policies and do not represent the agents' capabilities. Consequently, our approach provides higher-level primitives for building CISs. A prototype based on our approach has been implemented.