The Self-Organizing Enterprise Teams (SOET) project aims to study, design, develop, demonstrate, trial and evaluate self-organizing hybrid actor-agent networks generating robust context-dependent hierarchies of critical inter-organizational communication and knowledge management solutions for nomadic teams within and across enterprises. These solutions will be embedded and embodied systems interfacing and cooperating with existing network and service infrastructures of enterprises and provide the desired support at the team level. Thereto, the SOET project will develop multi-agent systems (MAS) by means of the so-called Common Hybrid Agent Platform (CHAP).  Both MAS and CHAP will capitalize on the observed evolving nomadic team and enterprise network communication and knowledge management structures and patterns within and across enterprises. CHAP aims in particular to enable self-learning and self-management of those evolving structures and organizations by means of MAS in order to serve the individual team members and the team as a whole in carrying out their communication and collaboration. CHAP will take advantage of the explicit and implicit feedback provided by individual members of nomadic teams and enterprises with respect to the MAS supported and ad-hoc networked applications. This way CHAP allows MAS supporting robust agile and pro-active team formation and coordination processes at business context-dependent critical scales. Thus the SOET project will sustain robust and flexible communication and knowledge management processes supporting ad-hoc networked team applications within and across enterprises.

SOET SCOPE

The SOET project aims at supporting self-organisation of team formation and coordination of personal and team interactions, where the specific goals are to bring into contact the key stakeholders within or across organizations and to improve their communication and collaboration processes. High added-value business activities in and across enterprises hinge often on the quality levels of such personal and team interactions.  Therefore, self-organization of teams is of key importance to flexibly interconnect and adapt organizations that want to rapidly and easily facilitate team communication and collaboration. This requires support by ambient intelligent networks, that are well integrated into the daily business of the various stakeholders. This implies amongst others that the ambient intelligent network support needs to be aware of the situational business contexts, procedures, opportunities, activity goals, etc. of those interacting stakeholders. The range of applications supported by such an ambient intelligent network infrastructure must range from daily appliances, in which ad-hoc networking of teams is mandatory to improve value-creation within an enterprise, to appliances for large networking events (e.g., trade fairs).

SOET ACTIVITIES

As the SOET project focuses on an ambient intelligent infrastructure based on a multi-agent systems (MAS) developed on a Common Hybrid Agent Platform (CHAP), it develops MAS networking algorithms and communication protocols for optimizing stakeholder interaction and team formation. Thereto, it provides in addition methods and tools to facilitate the further contextualization of MAS. Furthermore, it creates ad-hoc networked applications for intra-team communication and collaboration witin and across enterprises.  Finally, it will demonstrate the success of the approach by evaluating CHAP and a number of MAS prototypes developed for these.

SOET Outcomes

• SOET enables the development of MAS that provide dynamic protocol bridges at network and service infrastructural levels.
• SOET enables the development of MAS that provide users access to personalized nomadic team and enterprise portals at organizational levels.
• SOET develops MAS that realize context-aware and personalized sharing, processing and internalization of nomadic team and enterprise information and knowledge.
• SOET develops softw MAS that bridge communication and knowledge gaps or cope with their defects across nomadic teams and enterprises.
• SOET develops MAS that contextualize coalition formation and coordination of communication and knowledge management across nomadic teams and enterprises.
• SOET develops MAS feedback and escalaltion mechanisms towards team moderators in case of incidents.
• SOET creates two ad-hoc networked communication and collaboration applications for enterprise teams.
• SOET develops CHAP that enables the self-organization of MAS through e.g. dynamic learning.
• SOET evaluates CHAP and MAS for two ad-hoc networked application domains
• SOET demonstrates CHAP and MAS usability and utility.

The SOET project searches for potential partners with skills and expertise in:

• Large application development projects
• Communication Research 

PROFILE 1: The potential partner should develop a real case study to test CHAP and MAS for the ad-hoc networked applications, should analyse CHAP and MAS requirements and should contribute to their evaluation

Profile 2: The potential partners should perform research and development of ambient intelligent infrastructures in the form of CHAP and self-organising MAS supporting ad-hoc networked applications used by enterprise teams.

The SOET project searches in particular the follwoing partners:

• A large industrial company developing enterprise software applications and business solutions
• A university department in Communication Research or AI