Negotiation environment to support enterprise interoperability sustainability

Dissertation to obtain the Master degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceSpecialized and diversified global markets are facing a competitiveness that keeps pushing enterprises to abandon their traditional product centrism, where basically it is enough to concentrate their efforts in very narrow specialization fields and change their methods of work relying on networks of other providers that are able to fulfill their needs towards the development of complete solutions. These new methods of work, regarding the rapid change in markets and business organizations, requires new interoperability demands and complexity levels, from connection and syntax-oriented exchanges to semantic and model-oriented knowledge, which becomes very difficult for enterprises to cope with the pace of change. This dissertation proposes the implementation of a framework, based on agents and rules, to achieve solid and stable integration of solutions, via the use of a strong and formal negotiation mechanism, which will be the basis for increasing the enterprise interoperability in the supply chain for the development of solutions.European Commission through the funding of the FP7 ENSEMBLE, UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE project