Integration in cooperative distributed systems: Privacy-based brokering architecture for virtual enterprises

A cooperative distributed systems approach is a promising design paradigm for many application environments, such as virtual enterprises, distributed manufacturing, e-business, and tele-learning. However, coordination is a major challenge in developing cooperative distributed systems in open environments. This chapter discusses in detail, brokering as a capability-based aspect of coordination in cooperative distributed systems. Architecturally, the brokering is viewed as a layer of services where a brokering service is modeled as an agent with a specific architecture and interaction protocol that are appropriate to serve various requests. The architecture of the proposed brokering layer supports ad hoc configurations among distributed, possibly autonomous and heterogeneous entities with various degrees of privacy requirements in terms of three attributes: entity's identity, capability, and preferences. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented to support and provide information- gathering capabilities in healthcare environments using a FIPA-complaint platform (JADE).