The fundamental challenge of e-commerce is enabling companies to do business with one another across a network, despite different business processes and computer systems. Traditionally, these problems were overcome through expensive custom point-to-point integration or Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) networks. The promise of the Internet, by contrast, is an open e-business platform where companies can do business spontaneously with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Business Services Networks fulfill that vision. This talk introduces the concept of Business Services Networks and their profound business and technology implications for e-commerce. BSNs are Internet business communities where companies collaborate through loosely coupled business services. Participants register business services (e.g., place an order, make a payment) that others can discover and incorporate into their own business processes with a few clicks of a mouse. Companies can build on each other’s services, creating new services and linking them into industry-transforming, network-centric business models. We also discuss evolution of BSNs since early 1990’s, emerging technological underpinnings, and CommerceNet’s role in catalyzing their adoption.

Many real-world planning problems involve substantial amounts of domain-specific reasoning that is either awkward or inefficient to encode in a general purpose planner. A hybrid planning architecture for such domains is proposed. It utilizes a set of specialists to complement both the overall expressiveness and the efficiency of a traditional hierarchical planner. Such an architecture promises to retain the flexibility and generality of a classical planning framework while allowing deeper and more efficient domain-specific reasoning through specialists. The architecture has several ramifications on the internal operations of the planner as well as its interactions with the specialists. Continual interactions between the planner and the specialists necessitate an incremental, interactive, and least-commitment oriented approach to planning. As the planner and the specialists in such a model may use heterogeneous reasoning mechanisms and representations, a complete understanding of the operations of one by the other is not possible.>

The authors present a framework in which human and intelligent agents (IAs) can interact to facilitate the information flow and decision making in real-world enterprises. Underlying the framework is the notion of an enterprise model that is built by dividing complex enterprise operations into a collection of elementary tasks or activities. Each such task is then modeled in cognitive terms and entrusted to an IA for execution. Tasks that require human involvement are referred to the appropriate person through their personal assistant, a special type of IA that knows how to communicate both with humans, through multimedia interfaces, and with other IAs and the shared knowledge base. The computer-aided software engineering tools supported by a library of activity models permit every individual in an enterprise to model the activities with which they are personally most familiar. The preliminary experimental results suggest that this divide-and-conquer strategy, leading to cognitive models that are buildable and maintainable by end-users, is a viable approach to real-world distributed artificial intelligence.>