Decentralised Workflows and Software Agents

This paper argues that the combination of software agents with existing workflow management systems can facilitate the degree of co-ordination and collaboration required to make virtual enterprises a reality. It describes the use of software agents in the setting-up of decentralised workflows, the reactive and proactive redistribution of work during process failures, the promotion of interoperability between workflow management systems, and the visualisation and monitoring of decentralised business processes. An implementation is described which uses a number of industry standard components, such as the agent communication language defined by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, Java(TM) and the Process Interchange Format. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]