Abstract
Workflows represent the coordination requirements of various distributed operations in an organisation. Typical workflow management systems are centralised and rigid; they cannot cope with the unexpected flexibly. Multi-agent systems offer the possibility of enacting workflows in a distributed manner, via software agents which are intelligent and autonomous, and respect the constraints in a norm-governed organisation. Agents should bring flexibility and robustness to the workflow enactment process. In this paper, we describe a method for building a norm-governed multi-agent system which can enact a set of workflows and cope with exceptions. We do this by providing agents with knowledge of the organisation, the domain, and the tasks and capabilities of agents. This knowledge is represented with SemanticWeb languages, and agents can reason with it to handle exceptions autonomously.
This work is funded by the European Community (FP7 project ALIVE IST-215890).
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Lam, J., Guerin, F., Vasconcelos, W., Norman, T.J. (2010). Building Multi-Agent Systems for Workflow Enactment and Exception Handling. In: Padget, J., et al. Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems V. COIN 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14962-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14962-7_4
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