From Formal Work ow Models to Intelligent Agents

Todays business workkows, e.g. in administration, have a strong need for support by information technology, because they heavily rely on the eecient and uent interaction of human actors and artiicial systems. At the same time, workkow tasks supported or automatically executed by computers get more and more complex. Intelligent agents try to cope with both of these settings by providing a Software Engineering abstraction , which incorporates complex functionality for task planning and execution with elaborate interaction capabilities. This paper presents a method for identifying and specifying such agents and their behavior by careful analysis of formal workkow models. It follows a small example out of an industrial-size case study, which is currently conducted at Europe's biggest hospital , Charit e Berlin. There are at least two aspects of todays business workkows, which have to be considered for support by information technology. The rst aspect is the partially or fully automated execution of workkow tasks. These tasks get more and more complex and enforce the use of sophisticated methods, including planning, scheduling and constraint satisfaction. There are various successful contributions from Artiicial Intelligence on these topics (rf. e. The second aspect is the control of the task execution process itself. Since most real-world tasks and their execution are distributed spatially and among individuals, the coordination and interaction between the task execution entities is central to the management of business processes. Workkow Management has made successful contributions to this eld since the beginning of 1990 (rf. e.) is a recent concept, which tries to incorporate the merits of classical AI methods with strong communication and interaction capabilities. Hence, it seems to be predes-tined for application to workkow management, especially under the assumptions proposed by Hewitt's Open Systems (Hewitt 1988). Unfortunately, it is not simple to identify possible agents in a given business context and to specify their behavior. Should agents represent certain individuals, roles or even organizational units in the business domain or should they rather implement representations of tasks, processes and resources? In my opinion, these questions cannot be answered generally but only in the context of the given application domain. Nevertheless, I will present a method, which describes the identiication and the speciication of agents and their properties by a careful analysis of formal workkow models. This method can be applied to a wide range of applications, which involve distributed process control. The term \agent" can be interpreted as …