| Business Process Integration within organizations and across organizations is a highly relevant topic. Current industrial solutions are suffering from a lack of abstraction and have difficulties in hardly any method in which the economic decision-making and the technical design are aligned. One decision process in which this integration of economic and technical issues is needed has to do with the choice of the type of mediators, adapters. What is their role, when do they have an added value, and how can this value be realized in a cooperative game situation? The research proposed here aims to develop such a decision process based solidly on an interdisciplinary theory of coordination. This is done by means of empirical research on actual business integration projects, literature surveys (economic, organizational and computer science), and experimental research in a software agent test bed. The advantage of the agent paradigm is that it offers a high level of abstraction (such as goals and ontologies), fits well with the reality of independent autonomous parties in business, and is quite suitable for studying mechanisms of self-adaptation. |
