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In this paper, we will address privacy and trust issues that arise in more advanced software systems. Though a lot of information is currently available in electronic form, not all of it should widely be accessible to everybody. The involved parties need full control on how their data are used and who has access. If the system consists of autonomous software agents, this problem requires extra attention and new working principles. We illustrate this in the case of a communication platform for multimodal transport. The major aim of the communication platform is to enhance exchanging information and to ultimately improve organisation/collaboration within the transport sector. A better informed view of the transport sector will facilitate better considered decisions for users of the communication platform. The software system merits credibility by accurately modelling all the relevant real world interactions of potential users of the system. We opted for a connectivity solution in which software agents act as representatives of the parties involved. All agents can be equipped with human‐like skills and qualities such as intelligence, autonomy, and the ability to cooperate, coordinate and negotiate. We demonstrate how cooperation between parties can be achieved while respecting their sensitivity concerning information.

The purpose of this study is use a bibliometric analysis to explore the relational nature of knowledge creation in WFM in operations. Companies live under constant pressure to find the best ways to plan their workforce, and the workforce emangement (WFM) is one of the biggest challenges faced by managers. Relevant research on WFM in operations has been published in a several range of journals that vary in their scope and readership, and thus the academic contribution to the topic remains largely fragmented.

To address this gap, this review aims to map research on WFM in operations to understand where it comes from and where it is going and, therefore, provides opportunities for future work. This study combined two bibliometric approaches with manual document coding to examine the literature corpus of WFM in operations to draw a holistic picture of its different aspects.

Content and thematic analysis of the seminal studies resulted in the extraction of three key research themes: workforce cross-training, planning workforce mixed methods and individual workforce characteristics. The findings of this study further highlight the gaps in the WFM in operations literature and raise some research questions that warrant further academic investigation in the future.

Likewise, this study has important implications for practitioners who are likely to benefit from a holistic understanding of the different aspects of WFM in operations.