Agents for industry process management

Abstract

Industry processes are the trans-corporate business processes required to support the e-business environment. Industry process reengineering is the re-engineering of trans-corporate business processes as electronically managed processes. Industry process re-engineering is business process re-engineering on a massively distributed scale. Industry processes will not be restricted to routine workflows that follow a moreor-less fixed path; they will include complex processes for which their future path may be unknown at each stage in their existence. So a management system for industry processes should be both highly scalable and should be able to deal with such complex processes. A multi agent process management system is described that can manage processes of high complexity. This system is built from interacting autonomous components so achieving system scalability.