Workflow agents in the document-centred communication in MALL2000 systems

Daniela Handl, Hans-Juergen Hoffmann
Darmstadt University of Technology (Germany)
{handl, hoffmann}@pu.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de
 
 

1  The situation

In Electronic Commerce (EC), many business processes consist of tasks which are to be performed maybe simultaneously by different persons and / or programs.

2  The problem

The control of a business process can partly be done by a Workflow Management System (WfMS). The performance of business processes requires the ability to spontaneously react on rapidly changing demands and environments.

Initially, some business processes may be only partly defined or ad hoc workflows. Current WfMSs are not powerful enough to meet the resulting requirements for spontaneous reaction in a convenient manner.

Agents provide enough flexibility to handle these situations, but to rely merely on agent technology would involve an unacceptable descend of efficiency.

3  The idea

A dexterous combination of workflow and agent technology should provide the advantages of both approaches while dismissing the respective problems.

4  A solution

MALL2000 is a poject on business-to-business EC for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). One aim of the project is to provide document-centred support for the business people to contact, negotiate and contract.

In the context of MALL2000, a negotiation goes beyond bargaining for a price. It covers any communication necessary for the conduct of a business contact, including consultation of external partners for advisory or certification purposes. The course of trade is handled by HotFlow, a flexible and specialized WfMS for EC, and supported by HotAgent, a system of agents.

Three different types of agents are relevant for MALL2000: Actor Agents, Personal Agents, and Internal Agents.

5  Actor agents

One type of agent involved in a negotiation workflow of MALL2000 is the Actor Agent.

In the context of a WfMS, an actor is someone or something fulfilling a task. The Workflow Reference Model (WfRM) of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) identifies major components and interfaces, including the Interface for Invoked Applications (Interface 3).

Some applications are workflow-enabled and can be involved indirectly by the Workflow Engine. Other applications are not compatible with the standardized interface. Their integration into the business process is
possible via Actor Agents.

Towards the WfMS, an Actor Agent takes the role of an actor and is invoked by a workflow engine. The Actor Agent does not provide the functionality which is actually required at that state of the business process, but
enables indirect interaction of the workflow engine and the application in question.

The WfMS does not (and cannot) distinguish between the invocation of Actor Agents and the invocation of workflow-enabled applications. An Actor Agent is used if, for example, one business-partner wants to include into the document a list of all his products fitting certain demands and therefore needs to query his database, which will usually not be workflow-enabled.

6  Personal Agents

(Human) participants of a business process usually have many more daily tasks than are given by the WfMS.
This is especially true for participants of a wrokflow in the MALL2000 system.

A Personal Agent acts on behalf of a participant. The Personal Agent is configured so that it knows the personal preferences and relevant details of the general working environment. The Personal Agent is the substitute for and paves the way of the human participant by doing some routine work in advance and - as an example - creating the participant's agenda out of the worklist retrieved from the WfMS and additional information concerning the
participant's all-day work.

7  Internal Agents

In the lifecycle of a MALL2000 workflow, many routine tasks have to be done by the WfMS. It is crucial to take into account that a MALL2000 process definition, which results in a computerized definition of a business process ("build-time"), is usually done collaboratively by plural actors, belonging to different organizations. Some closely related tasks which are exclusively carried out by workflow participants belonging to one single enterprise might be summed up to one action in order to hide internal organizational structures from the other partners. But of course it is necessary to give the detailed definition of tasks to the enterprise's employees who will carry them out.

An Internal Agents of the WfMS provides different views (and access rights), depending on the enterprise the participant belongs to and on the role the actor holds (there might be different access rights dependend on the status or the department inside the enterprise).

Additional Internal Agents are employed during run-time to support the process control functions of the WfMS. One example is an agent which controls the schedule of time-limited tasks. In case of a delayed task, it reminds the reponsible worker and / or notifies the participant who gave the time-limit that the task might be late.

8  Conclusion

Systems for sophisticated business-to business Electronic Commerce which go beyond the simple "customer orders, supplier delivers" line of trade, can handle the communication of the business partners as a dynamic workflow. To build a WfMS flexible and powerful enough for this area would be very expensive and maybe not even possible.

MALL2000 uses HotFlow, a specialized WfMS for dynamic processes in document-centred business-to-business Electronic Commerce in combination with HotAgent, a system of agents providing a broad spectrum of functionality for users, application programs, and the WfMS itself.
 

Acknowledgement

The work reported here is based on research done at the Darmstadt University of Technology, Chair on Programming Languages and Compilers, and continued in the scope of the INCO Copernicus project MALL FOR ONLINE BUSINESS BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 (MALL2000), sponsored by EU (# 977041). All opinions expressed are those of the authors.
 

References

The Workflow Management Coalition, The Workflow Reference Model. Document Number TC00-1003, Issue 1.1, 1995.

Chang, Jin W., and Colin T. Scott, Agent-based Workflow: TRP Support Environment (TSE). In: Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Volume 28, issues 7-11, p. 1501.

Handl, Daniela, and  Hans-Juergen Hoffmann, MALL2000 - A document-based platform for negotiations in electronic commerce. Accepted as a conference paper for HCI'99. Munich (Germany) 1999.

MALL2000 consortium, http://www-it.fmi.uni-sofia.bg/mall2000/home.html, 1999, and http://www.pu.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/Projekte/Mall2000, 1999.

Multiagent Systems on the Net and Agents in E-Commerce. Articles in Communications of the ACM, March 1999, Volume 42, Number 3.


Position Paper. International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Information Systems (AOIS'99), Seattle, May 1999. See http://www.AOIS.org