The design of cooperative workflow management model based on agent

Abstract

This paper analyses the state of the art in workflow management systems and then presents a cooperative workflow management model based on agents (COWBA), which has three levels of architecture. The first is the process definition level that defines properties related to activities; the second is the workflow enactment service level that includes instantiated agent, cooperative agent and activity agent; the third is the user interface and invoked application level. By utilizing agent and object-oriented technology, a cooperative agent, instantiated agent and activity agent can be built on the basis of the object-oriented workflow meta-process model. Therefore, the ability of self-organization, self-learning and coordination has been enhanced.