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BDI-agents for agile goal-oriented business processes

Published: 12 May 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Business processes are the core assets of enterprises. They turn the business potential into actual competitiveness on the market. To face the challenges posed by today's changing and uncertain business environment, traditional business process management (BPM) approaches are not sufficient anymore. This paper presents an approach to business process management, which leverages Agent Technology, especially BDI-Agent features to obtain agile business process behavior. This paper sketches the problem, describes the solution approach, and presents the experiences gained in a concrete case study in the domain of Engineering Change Management.

References

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Angelica de Antonio

Burmeister et al. aptly claim that business process management (BPM) demands levels of flexibility and agility (where agility is understood as the capability of the process to proactively adapt to a changing environment) that current solutions are not able to face. As a first step toward the solution of this problem, a new goal- and context-oriented approach to BPM is presented. Process modeling, under this new focus, proceeds from the identification of the process' goal hierarchies, through the definition of the context variables that can influence process execution, and to the establishment of plans that address specific sub-goals under certain context configurations. Starting from this modeling approach, the paper proposes the use of belief-desire-intention (BDI) agents for business process modeling and execution. An almost direct correspondence is established between the process goals, variables, and plans, on one hand, and agent beliefs, desires, intentions, and plans, on the other hand. Even though the paper suggests the use of BDI agents for BPM as its most innovative contribution, other approaches, such as the Agentis platform, rely on a similar idea. Instead, the main contribution is in the proposed goal- and context-oriented modeling process, and its prototype application to a real-world business process, the Engineering Change Management process of Daimler AG, with some interesting lessons learned. Definitely, readers working in BPM will find the paper more interesting than readers coming from the agents world. Online Computing Reviews Service

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cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '08: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: industrial track
May 2008
140 pages

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International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 12 May 2008

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Author Tags

  1. BDI agents
  2. agile business processes
  3. autonomous agents
  4. business process management
  5. goal-oriented business process modeling

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AAMAS08
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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

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  • (2017)BDI agent testability revisitedAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-016-9356-231:5(1094-1132)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
  • (2015)On the testability of BDI agent systemsProceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/2832747.2832844(4217-4221)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2015
  • (2015)Integrating Agent Actions and Workflow OperationsRevised Selected Papers of the 13th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies - Volume 943310.1007/978-3-319-27343-3_4(61-78)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2015
  • (2015)A Formal Description of a Mapping from Business Processes to AgentsRevised, Selected, and Invited Papers of the Third International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems - Volume 931810.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_9(153-170)Online publication date: 5-May-2015
  • (2014)Mining Agents’ Goals in Agent-Oriented Business ProcessesACM Transactions on Management Information Systems10.1145/26294485:4(1-22)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2014
  • (2014)Reasoning on Secrecy Constraints under Uncertainty to Classify Possible ActionsProceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems - Volume 836710.1007/978-3-319-04939-7_4(97-116)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2014
  • (2013)GoalSPECProceedings of the First International Conference on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems10.5555/3100666.3100679(235-254)Online publication date: 6-May-2013
  • (2013)State-of-the-art of intention recognition and its use in decision makingAI Communications10.5555/2594582.259458826:2(237-246)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2013
  • (2012)Providing an agent flavored integration for workflow managementTransactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency V10.5555/2231056.2231067(243-264)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012
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