Towards Agent-Based 'Smart' Collaboration in Enterprise Networks

International competition and dynamically changing customer demands lead SME’s to join dynamically formed, ‘smart’ enterprise networks aiming to increase their competitiveness and market share. Supporting such networks with decision making related to collaborations and providing adaptive user interfaces are key challenges. In this paper, we use furniture manufacturing SME’s as a case study and we provide an overview of our ongoing work on e-Furn, an agent-based system for supporting ‘smart’ collaboration in enterprise networks. We outline two main features of the proposed approach: a) assisting users in typical collaboration decisions, such as product bundling and task outsourcing, and b) providing users with dynamically adaptive user interfaces.