mPower: A component-based development framework for multi-agent systems to support business processes

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is the difficulty of implementing heterogeneous interactions among participating agents via asynchronous messages. This difficulty arises from the need to understand how to combine elements of various content languages, ontologies, and interaction protocols in order to construct meaningful and appropriate messages. In this paper mPower, a component-based layered framework for easing the development of multi-agent systems, is described, and the facility for customising the components for reuse in similar domains is explained. The framework builds on the JADE-LEAP platform, which provides a homogeneous layer over diverse operating systems and hardware devices, and allows ubiquitous deployment of applications built on multi-agent systems both in wired and wireless environments. The use of the framework to develop mPowermobile , a multi-agent system to support mobile workforces, is reported

WIDE - A Distributed Architecture for Workflow Management

This paper presents the distributed architecture of the WIDE workflow management system. We show how distribution and scalability are obtained by the use of a distributed object model, a client/server architecture, and a distributed workflow server architecture. Specific attention is paid to the extended transaction support and active rule support subarchitectures

Educational process modelling with workflow and time Petri nets : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The research presented in this thesis describes how to use workflow management technology to model educational processes with a time axis. As workflow management technology has been widely used in modelling business processes, it has the potential to model educational processes. Based upon the components of workflow, educational processes and business processes have many common features such that educational processes can be modelled with workflow management technology. In addition, owing to the importance of the time component in processes, time Petri nets have been chosen as the design language for the modelling of the educational processes. The notation of time Petri nets has been illustrated in this thesis for the educational process. In this thesis, three different educational processes have been presented and modelled with workflow management technology as well as with time Petri nets individually. Furthermore, the architecture of the educational process management system has been constructed by adopting the reference model from the Workflow Management Coalition. To show the validity of using workflow management technology in the education domain, a sub-process of an educational process has been modelled and developed with certain developing techniques. It provides the potential research direction for further research on the modelling of educational process with workflow technology associated with a time component

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Anytime Cognition: An information agent for emergency response

Planning under pressure in time-constrained environments while relying on uncertain information is a challenging task. This is particularly true for planning the response during an ongoing disaster in a urban area, be that a natural one, or a deliberate attack on the civilian population. As the various activities pertaining to the emergency response need to be coordinated in response to multiple reports from the disaster site, a user finds itself cognitively overloaded. To address this issue, we designed the Anytime Cognition (ANTICO) concept to assist human users working in time-constrained environments by maintaining a manageable level of cognitive workload over time. Based on the ANTICO concept, we develop an agent framework for proactively managing a user’s changing information requirements by integrating information management techniques with probabilistic plan recognition. In this paper, we describe a prototype emergency response application in the context of a subset of the attacks devised by the American Department of Homeland Security

TeamWorker: An agent-based support system for mobile task execution

Traditional workflow management systems are considered insufficiently flexible to support autonomous job management via close team working. This paper proposes a multi-agent system approach to enhancing existing workflow management systems to enable team-based job management in the field of telecommunications service provision and maintenance. This paper adopts a component-based approach and explains how applications can be developed by customising the generic components provided by a multi-agent systems framework