Abstract
There is an increasing interest on developing virtual enterprises in order to deal with
the globalisation of the economy, the rapid growth of information technologies and the
increase of competitiveness. In this paper we deal with the development of normative
open virtual enterprises (NOVEs). They are systems with a global objective that are
composed of a set of heterogeneous entities and enterprises that exchange services
following a specific normative context. In order to analyse and design systems of this
kind the multi-agent paradigm seems suitable because it offers a specific solution for
supporting the social and contractual relationships between enterprises and for formalising
their business processes. This paper presents how the Regulated Open Multiagent
systems (ROMAS) methodology, an agent-oriented software methodology, can
be used to analyse and design NOVEs. ROMAS offers a complete development
process that allows identifying and formalising of the structure of NOVEs, their
normative context and the interactions among their members. The use of ROMAS is
exemplified by means of a case study that represents an automotive supply chain.
