Using Agents to Achieve Process Coherence

ions for Composite Activities Information management in the large involves three main concerns, which must be addressed by any approach for constructing solutions: • data integrity and flow: correctness of data and how it is conveyed from one party to another • organizational structure: how the various parties relate to each other • autonomy: how the autonomy of the different parties is preserved. Table 1 summarizes the major abstractions for programming composite activities. Database transactions are the most rigorous, and require that only correct data ever be visible [11]. This entails that outputs be released only when a transaction completes. Thus, the producer of data is restricted, but the consumer has full autonomy, unless it also is a transaction. Spheres of control (SoCs) release results early, but may undo and redo the consumers—thus, consumers have no autonomy [8]. Extended transactions release results liberally, but restrict the autonomy of their components by requiring compensating subtransactions to undo the effects of data that are invalidated [8]. Workflows ignore the integrity aspects, but capture the data flow required by specific applications [10]. They allow autonomy, but are not flexible. Spheres of commitments are discussed below. Support Provided (columns) Integrity & Autonomy Organizational 1 Ericsson New Concepts Group, Research Triangle Park, NC. 2 IBM Intelligent Agents Group, Research Triangle Park, NC. 3 Dept of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC.