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Real and virtual organizations are conducted by preferences, goals, and policies. Since virtual organizations have a two-level structure the preferences of these different levels are a source of conflicting interests. Also, management policies itself are subject to change, especially in a virtual setting. Therefore, agility has superior value, causing the need to develop business information and planning systems that may be adapted easily. Both mentioned aspects of business planning software, namely, ease adaptation on one side and the integration of individual preferences and goals on the other are treated in the paper. An architectural design is proposed that meets the needs of virtual organizations as far as any conflicts can be solved on an individual basis. This concept is further elaborated. Negotiating agents that obey the preferences of their principals are considered as a means to search for compromise solutions. An extensive example derived from hospital management illustrates the concept.

In distributed systems, traders mediate between clients and service providers. This paper introduces a trading model, which supports multiagent systems (MAS) and goes beyond simple trading in three ways: (a) Service composition — The trader composes complex services of the current service offers. During the composition, it checks the availability of the service offers. (b) Use of group agents — Group agents represent a group of agents with their individual policies and other context information. The trader can use the group agent's information for a pre-selection of service offers. (c) Adaptability — The trading model uses the notion of clients' trust into services and adapts to the clients' preferences and system policies. The trading model is used in a Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) application, in which the trader finds adequate communication services for project teams with geographically distributed members.

Product development capability is more and more important for an enterprise in a knowledge-based economic era. In the philosophy of concurrent engineering, product development should be carried out in a concurrent way. Computer support is necessary for Concurrent Product Development (CPD). As an excellent tool to meet complex needs, CSCW has been used in CPD. But nearly all CSCW systems that have been developed so far concentrate on a more or less narrow sub-field of cooperative work. Thus, the need of integrated CSCW applications are apparent. The agent is a suitable programming paradigm that can be used to meet the complex needs. In this paper, a P-PROCE (Process, Product, Resource, Organization, Control & Evaluation) model is introduced for CPD firstly. By categorizing the agents of the multi-agent system (MAS) into different types of agent according to P-PROCE model and offering a structure of MAS, the CPD is mapped to MAS. The cooperation among agents is very important for MAS. In the paper, a two-layer cooperation structure of MAS is proposed. In the macro layer, agent based workflow control the CPD process and in the micro layer the entity agents interact with each other directly to fulfill the task. The key issues of these two cooperation layers are discussed in the paper. Component based structure of agent and an implemented case are also provided in the paper.