Managing Heterogeneous Transaction Workflows with Cooperating Agents

This paper describes how a set of autonomous computational agents can cooperate in providing coherent management of transaction workflows in environments where there are many diverse information resources. The agents use models of themselves and of the resources that are local to them. Resource models may be the schemas of databases, frame systems of knowledge bases, domain models of business environments, or process models of business operations. Models enable the agents and information resources to use the appropriate semantics when they interoperate. This is accomplished by specifying the semantics in terms of a common ontology. We discuss the contents of the models, where they come from, and how the agents acquire them. We then describe a set of agents for telecommunication service provisioning and show how the agents use such models to cooperate. The agents implement virtual state machines, and interact by exchanging state information. Their interactions produce an implementation of relaxed transaction processing.