Three Intelligent Architectures for Business Process Management

Business process covers the spectrum from production workflow to emergent process. Production workflows are pre-defined, routine business processes typically found at the lower levels of an organisation. Emergent processes are opportunistic, one-off business processes typically found at the executive and higher levels of an organisation. Business process management is an accepted applications area for intelligent systems. A categorisation of three classes of business process of increasing complexity is given. A different intelligent architecture is defined for each of those three classes of process. These intelligent architectures range from a single knowledge-based system to a three-layer BDI, hybrid multi-agent architecture specifically intended for emergent process management. These three architectures are all general purpose but are increasingly powerful in the sense that each maps naturally into a sub-set of the next. These three architectures have been trialed on business process management applications in a university administrative context.