A Work ow System through Cooperating Agents for

Abstract. In this paper we describe an architecture that provides for automating and monitoring the ow ofcontrol and document over the Internet among di erent organizations, thereby creating a platform necessary to describe higher order processes involving several organizations and companies. The higher order process is designed through a graphical user interface and is executed through cooperating agents that are automatically initialized at each site that the process executes. Agents handle the activities at their site, provide for coordination with other agents in the system by routing the documents in electronic form according to the process description. The system is capable of activating external applications (which may be inside the company rewall) when necessary, keeping track of process information, and providing for the security and authentication of documents as well as comprehensive monitoring facilities. The architecture is general enough to be applied to any business practice where data ow and invocation of activities among different industries and cooperations follow a pattern that can be described through a process de nition, however since the project is on maritime industry, some of the graphical user interfaces are customized accordingly. The system is fully operational for industrial use.

A Workflow System through Cooperating Agents for Control and Document Flow over the Internet

In this paper we describe an architecture that provides for automating and monitoring the flow of control and document over the Internet among different organizations, thereby creating a platform necessary to describe higher order processes involving several organizations and companies. The higher order process is designed through a graphical user interface and mapped to the textual workflow definition language of the system called FlowDL. A process definition in FlowDL is executed through cooperating agents that are automatically initialized at each site that the process executes. Agents handle the activities at their site, provide for coordination with other agents in the system by routing the documents in electronic form according to the process description. The system is capable of activating external applications (which may be inside the company firewall) when necessary, keeping track of process information, and providing for the security and authentication of documents as well ..

The MARIFlow Workflow Management System

MARIFlow System [1] provides for automating and monitoring the flow of control and data over the Internet among different organizations, thereby creating a platform necessary to describe higher order processes involving several organizations and companies. The architecture is general enough to be applied to any business practice where data flow among different industries and cooperations and the invocation of activities follow a pattern that can be described through a process definition. The example application provided within the scope of this project is on maritime industry A MARIFlow process is executed through cooperating agents, called MARCAs (MARIFlow Cooperating Agents) that are automatically initialized at each site that the process executes. MARCAs handle the activities at their site, provide for coordination with other MARCAs in the system by routing the documents in electronic form according to the process description, keeping track of process information, and providing for the security and authentication of documents as well as comprehensive monitoring facilities. More specifically, the functionality provided by the system is as follows: ¯ A declarative means to specify the control of document flow over the Internet where it is possible to define the source of data, its control flow and the activities that make use of this data. ¯ A fully distributed execution architecture achieved through cooperating agents over the Internet. The agents know about other agents that they need to communicate with and preserve their state during communication. They also manage local information for monitoring purposes and for recovering from failures. ¯ Communicating with inside firewall applications. A MARCA can activate in-house activities automati

Design and implementation of a distributed workflow management system: METUFlow

Workflows are activities involving the coordinated execution of multiple tasks performed by different processing entities, mostly in distributed heterogeneous environments which are very common in enterprises of even moderate complexity. Centralized workflow systems fall short to meet the demands of such environments