Introducing a process infrastructure for agent systems

Abstract

Within open distributed systems the realization of a spanning application is an open problem. While the local functionality can be implemented based on established approaches, the overall control of the processes to form a consistent and correct application remains difficult. Workflow management systems (WFMS) are one solution for process control. In combination with distributed systems further issues have to be solved and are investigated here under different perspectives like Petri nets (to provide a true concurrency semantics of the concepts) and agents (to provide a powerful middleware and a more abstract modeling paradigm than objects or components). In this paper we coin the phrase process infrastructure. The idea is to provide all means to model, build, control and maintain the processes within open agent networks as special distributed systems by combining the above mentioned concepts and techniques. To gain such a powerful process infrastructure, we started to build prototypes, which stepwise introduce some implementations of the advanced concepts. The potential of our proposed solution lies in its flexibility and rigorous formal precision. Thanks to the latter the models are directly executable. The approach introduces autonomous and adaptive handling of processes in specific units (agents), which use and produce the necessary infrastructure to handle processes in different contexts on all levels. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.