Abstract:
The fast evolution of the World Wide Web and the changes made in the economic world motivate companies to invest more and more in the e-business. Since e-business became an economic cooperation activity, we can say that it has changed the rules of the market and the
role of information technology (IT). The rapid growth of the technical and organizational needs creates several intelligent solutions for the e-business domain. The main perceived obstacle to ebusiness is the fewest number of methodologies that exist for the development of complete ebusiness projects. In order to ensure the effective establishment of e-business applications in a company, it must be developed and implemented from the business requirements and not from
the technological viewpoint. In this perspective, we propose in this thesis a multi-agent approach that provides solutions to the problems raised during the development of cooperative e-business applications.
This approach is organized in the form of cooperative application groups representing the different parts of a company. Agent coordinators orchestrate the cooperative work of these groups. The most requested functionalities inside the company and those offered to the external world can be exported as Web Services. These Web Services are described with DAML-based Web Service ontology (OWL-S) and managed with an intermediate agent called Web Service Finder Agent. The proposed solution provides a new vision of the cooperation context where the
companies and their partners share knowledge and offer functionalities as agents and Web Services.
