Integration of Workflow and
Agent Technology for Business
Process Management
Yuhong Yan. Maamar, Z. Weiming Shen
Enterprise Integration Lab.Toronto Univ.Canada
Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design,
The Sixth International Conference on, 2001
Agenda
Introduction
 Workflow Management
 Software Agent Technology
 Integration of Workflow and Agent
Technologies
 Conclusion

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Introduction

Benefits of workflow management:
– Explicit definition
– Quick reaction to changing environments
– Easy tracking of operations
Focus on managing the process logic
 Needs to integrate others : activity
assignment, resource allocation, etc.

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Workflow Management for
Business Process Management
Workflow is the computerized facilitation
or automation of a business process, in
whole or part – by WfMC’s definition
 Benefits of applying workflow

– Explicitly defined, then easy to optimize
– Modularized, then reorganized by WFMS
– Track daily operations
– Integrate applications on different platform
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Workflow Management (Cont.)
– Provide personal workplaces
– Separate business logic, can concentrate
only on the task

Shortcomings
– Relying on one central control
– Lack of automation
– Lack of reactivity
– Lack of resources management
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Workflow Management (Cont.)
– Lack of semantics
– Lack of generic interfaces
– Lack of interoperation

To embody WFMSs with mechanisms
from other technologies
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Software Agent Technology for
Business Process Management
An agent is a computer system situated
in some environment, and that is
capable of autonomous action in this
environment in order to meet its design
objectives – Jennings and Wooldridge
 An “agent based system” means one in
which the key abstraction used in that of
agent

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Software Agent Technology
(Cont.)

Benefits
– Distributed system architecture
– Automation
– Interaction
– Resource management
– Reactivity
– Interoperation among heterogeneous
systems
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Software Agent Technology
(Cont.)
– Intelligent decision-making

Problems if only use agent technology
– Missing coordination mechanism
– Optimization is difficult due to lack of
explicitly definitions
– Not easy to track daily operations
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Integration of Workflow and
Agent Technologies

Agent-enhanced workflow management
– One central workflow engine controls all
the activities
– Agents are invocated during the execution
of one work item to implement certain
tasks
– Current commercial WFMSs use the
concept of agents
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Agent-enhanced (Cont.)
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Agent-enhanced (Cont.)
Agents are like services provided by the
WFMS – to increase automation
 Agents do not necessarily interact with
each other
 Workflow engine is responsible to
create and eliminate agents
 The agent is more like a piece of
ordinary software

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Integration of Workflow and
Agent Technologies (Cont.)

Agent-based workflow management
– A distributed system consisting of multiple
agents
– These agents are independent to each
other and each is responsible for process
execution
– The whole business process is formed by
the pieces of sub-networks within those
agents
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Agent-based (Cont.)
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Agent-based (Cont.)
The process logic is embedded in the
agents, rather than being explicitly
represented elsewhere
 Benefits workflow technology

– Providing distributed system architecture
– Providing communication methods
– Providing automation behavior
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Agent-based (Cont.)
– Reaction to environment
– Benefits of high level features

Some important research issues
– System architecture
– Negotiation → resource management &
scheduling
– Modeling, learning, agent architecture
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Integration of Workflow and
Agent Technologies (Cont.)

The life cycle of a business process
management – O’Brain and Wiegrand
– creation, provisioning, enactment

Creation
– involves the analysis modeling and
definition of the business processes
– main aim is to present the logic of the
activities in business process
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Remarks (Cont.)
– mainly done at design time

Provisioning
– involves the assignment of resources
– require negotiating,planning,scheduling
– place at run time

Enactment
– Involves the management activities
– place at run time
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Conclusion
Agent-enhanced workflow system are
widely adopted
 Agent-based workflow system are still in
prototypes
 Agents can help to automate the
management of business process
 Future research opportunities

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