Self-Organized B2B Production Networks. Part I. Concept and Basic Tasks

Abstract

Network-centric business implemented via open self-organizing B2B production network is a relatively novel concept of global business organization that has become the subject of the active research and development during the last decade. In the developed countries, this paradigm is considered as a new very promising future model of distributed business and virtual organizations. The paper analyzes the state-of-the-art in this field, formulates its key problems and challenges and proposes, for B2B production network, an open self-organized multi-agent architecture. It describes and justifies the proposed basic models designed to solve the key B2B production network applied tasks. Among them, it outlines panning task that is allocation of particular components of a completely distributed business process to particular network nodes to execute, and distributed coordination of local schedules of the network nodes solving the allocated subtasks of the shared business processes. The significant attention is also paid to the description of the developed model of the software infrastructure intended to support network node communications and interactions in ad-hoc (p2p) manner. The fundamental role of self-organization as the basis of the B2B-open network applied and infrastructural functionalities is emphasized. The B2B production network is considered as a basic class of applications that best fits great potential of self-organized B2B network as a distributed production model.