Forming Agents for Workflow-Oriented Process Orchestration

The sophistication and maturity of distributed component-based services and semantic web services provide a promising environment for specification-driven service composition. Given the dynamic nature of this domain, the autonomy and adaptation of software agents represent a viable solution for the composition and enactment of cross-organizational services. Currently, there are few studies that measure the impact of the dynamic environmental effects on service composition. On an on-going basis, composite services or workflow processes of web services may be in constant flux as far as responsiveness of services, accessibility of services and their meta-information, business process schema changes, etc. These conditions impact what interactions a team of agents must undergo to achieve a specific process derived of composite web services. This paper describes an approach, model, and supporting software toward the evaluation of agent interactions, as an initial step, toward the efficient formation of agent teams. In the approaches presented in this paper, we evaluate interaction protocols for business process orchestration in response to certain environmental conditions.