Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering

Abstract

In industry, people who design business processes are often different from those designing the technical realization. Also, they generally use different languages, such as BPMN on the one hand and UML on the other. While agents are theoretically suitable for designing and implementing business ideas, multi-agent methodologies are generally not geared towards them. In this paper, we describe the first step of mapping business process diagrams to agent concepts. To this end, we present a graph based representation of BPMN together with structural and semantical analysis methods. These provide the necessary formal grounding for the mapping we have in mind.