With the development of international trade, collaborative organizations are involved in the value chain to accomplish their cooperative goals. Business organizations try to operate as efficiently as possible while governmental organizations have to regulate business performance. Governmental regulation of multi-organization alliances is not only complex but also time-consuming. Hence, interactions between business and governmental organizations is changing from monolithic control by regulatory authorities to distributed environments where private enterprises are free to regulate their affairs within the boundaries set by the regulatory authorities. The former way of controlling is called direct control and the latter is named self-regulation. In order to determine the effects and possibilities of different approaches for direct control and self-regulation, a careful analysis is required to make sure that integrated business processes are performed in a secure and smooth way. To this end, based on an existing agent based organization modeling approach OperA [1], we propose a framework that enables modeling and comparisons between different interorganizational collaborative approaches. 1 Extended abstract of a paper originally published at EGOV 2011, Delft, The Netherlands.
Introduction
We first illustrate several concepts extended from OperA. A role is a set of objectives
which indicate individual responsibility. To facilitate multi-level modeling from
abstract to concrete, we define two kinds of roles: (
To provide actors with an evolutionary understanding of their responsibilities, a modeling process for organizational interactions is depicted in Fig. 1. First, a general specification is constructed to express the common objectives of inter-organizational collaborations in an abstract way. Then according to different contexts, the general specification is contextualized into different contextual specifications which describe the interactive relationships in a more detailed way and present the differences between different collaborative situations. Contextualization transforms some of the atomic roles to composite roles which contain more information on how to regulate the actors’ behavior. Finally, the whole set of contextual specifications is transformed into different operational specifications which depict complete pictures of an interorganizational collaboration model in different executable situations. That is, actors will match their status with the contexts in contextual specifications. Concrete
General specification
Contextualization Contextual specification
Operationalization
Operational specification
org0
Direct control Selft regulation
The proposed model describes inter-organizational interactions from abstract attitudes to concrete implementation, which supports users to understand their models during the procedure and reflect their design patterns even at the final operational stage. Moreover, it provides a potential solution to deal with the communication problems between multi-agents that jointly create shared norms.