Extending Database Support for Coordination Among Agents

Abstract

Coordination and collaboration are naturally used by groups for carrying out activities and solving problems that require cooperation. However, getting a set of computer agents to do the same has been a problem – primarily addressed by the AI community and recently by the database community as workflow and process management problems (for example, in business processes, electronic commerce, logistics). Not surprisingly, the problem has been addressed at different levels of abstraction by the two communities. Coordination protocols as well as task and result sharing have been investigated by the AI community; specification of alternative transaction models to meet the requirements of non-traditional applications, and their execution have been addressed by the database community. It is evident that there is a need for bringing the two approaches together to develop systems that support cooperative problem solving. This paper – argues for the use of active databases in general and active capability in particular as an enabling technology for cooperative problem solving and cooperative information systems – details a novel approach for supporting task sharing, a key aspect of CPS, using active capability – elaborates on a methodology for mapping task shared protocols expressed in high level speech acts to Event Condition-Action (ECA) rules.