A Service-Oriented Agent-Based Model for Electronic Procurement

Abstract

Globalization has evoked rethinking in organizing the business processes of many enterprises in order to keep pace with the competition and dynamic nature of the market. There has been continuing research for suitable paradigms and technologies that can facilitate efficient and yet less expensive solutions, a feature that is so important for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Towards this end, the chapter presents a service-oriented framework that is based on the notion of Internet-accessible services to represent applications and to integrate business processes. This model propounds a metadata- driven approach to dynamically publish, discover, and select services in heterogeneous settings while engaging in business transactions such as e-procurement across organizational boundaries. The concept of software agents is also employed as a means to automate the activities relating to a procurement cycle. The central theme of this chapter is to motivate the adoption of a service-oriented agent-based framework which can provide an effective and efficient solution to e-procurement.