Establishing agreements in dynamic virtual organizations

We present a framework that introduces key concepts relevant to agreement negotiation in virtual organizations (VO). The framework serves as a foundation for implementing an automated system that facilitates the establishment of VO agreements, considerably reduces the effort for setting up a VO and consequently reduces the VO's time for operation. The framework captures the relationship between the initial participants' behaviors, expectations, obligations and agreements, making sure that in implementing a system, one does not overlook the important aspects of the agreement structure and negotiation. The framework can be used to validate a negotiation, ensure validity of the achieved agreement and form strategies for future negotiations. A novel aspect of the initial trust establishment described in this paper is the consideration of the effects of the participants' behaviors during the negotiation process on mutual trust. We use the concepts to describe our work-in-progress for specification and negotiation of the agreements that govern the behavior of VO entities.