Agents and Web services supported business exception management

Abstract

The unpredictability of business processes requires that business applications support exception management with the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing environment. Exception management is a kind of complex process, in which multiple organizations and mixture of human activities and automated tasks may be involved. For a competitive solution to exception management, a web services and agents supported approach is elaborated in this paper. Agent technology is applied to deal with the dynamic, complex, and distributed processes in exception management; web services techniques are proposed for more scalability and interoperability in network-based business environment. By integrating knowledge-based agents with web services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach leads to more intelligence, flexibility and collaboration in business exception management. A case of exception management in securities trading is developed to demonstrate the validity and benefits of this approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.