Reconciling physical, communicative, and social/institutional domains in agent oriented information systems - A unified framework

Abstract

One of a business system's roles is to provide a representation of a Universe of Discourse, which reflects its structure and behaviour. An equally important function of the system is to support communication within an organisation by structuring and co-ordinating the actions performed by the organisations agents. These two roles of a business system may be represented in terms of business and process models, i.e. the separation of the declarative aspects from the procedural control flow aspects of the system. Although this separation of concerns has many advantages, the differences in representation techniques and focus of the two model types constitutes a problem in itself. The main contribution of this paper is a unified framework based on agent oriented concepts to facilitate the analysis and integration of business models and process models in e-Commerce in a systematic way. The approach suggested bridges the gap between the declarative and social/economic aspects of a business model and the procedural and communicative aspects of a process model. We illustrate how our approach can be used to facilitate integration, process specification, process pattern interpretation and process choreography. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.