Business rules for creating process flexibility: Mapping RIF rules and BDI rules

Abstract

Business rules and software agents can be used for creating flexible business processes. The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a new W3C recommendation standard for exchanging rules among disparate systems. Yet, the impact that the introduction of RIF has on the design of flexible business processes is unclear. Intelligent software agents can be used to create dynamic business processes. The BDI architectural style is regarded as the predominant approach for the implementation of intelligent agents. It is expected that using RIF can enhance the reasoning capability of agents. Yet, these two developments are not connected. In this research, an approach is developed for integrating RIF and BDI agents. This approach consists of an integration architecture and equivalence principles for rule translation. The equivalence principles are demonstrated using examples. The results show that the approach allows the integration of RIF with BDI agent programming and in this way enhances agent reasoning capabilities. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.