Behavioral Norms in Virtual Organizations

Virtual Organizations (VOs) consist of groups of agents that collaborate towards achieving their specified goals. VO Partners are independent, autonomous, and heterogeneous, thus often exhibiting complex behaviors in co-working. Frictional behavior demonstrated by even a few partners, may cause drastic results and total failure of the VO. Therefore, it is necessary to model and analyze VO partners’ behavior. This paper introduces the VO Supervision Assistance Tool (VOSAT), developed based on leveraging partners’ commitments/promises, to monitor partners’ behavior against the synergetic norms in the VO. For this purpose, three kinds of behavioral norms are defined, including: socio-legal norms, functional norms, and activity-related norms. Additionally, a fuzzy norm is introduced to indicate agents’ trustworthy behavior. The functionalities supported in VOSAT enable the VO coordinator with identifying the high risk tasks and the weak or weakest points in the flow of VO planned operations. It further assists the coordinator with finding suitable candidate partners for handling the exceptions that arise during the VO operation phase. These in turn improve the success rate of the VOs.