An Agent-Based Coordination Model on Work ow Databases

Work owmanagement, one of the important technologies for supporting collaborative work, requires database technologies like distributed data management or transaction management. However, as work ow management systems have several heterogeneities like heterogeneity about agents, spatial heterogeneity, temporal heterogeneity, etc., collaboration model for work ow management should resolve these heterogeneities. In this paper, we propose a collaboration model for work ow management using a heterogeneous distributed problem solver Helios. Agents, environments in which agents coordinate each other, and coordination among agents are modeled by message passing among agents. These modeling give semantics of agents in Work ow Base, previously proposed formal work ow database model based on object-oriented data model, as coordination entities.