pax

The research areas agents and workflow management systems were analysed almost independent in the past. Agents show a number of solutions for different problems in workflow management systems. Therefore, it has to be examined in which fields the use of agents in workflow management is promising and how a solution could look like. Traditional workflow management systems are monolithic, i.e. they have a central server who controls the running processes. In a system with hundreds of clients this server must have very high performance. A problem is the reliability of the server. If the server crashes, the whole system stops. Another problem is the connection between the workflow system and other systems. Especially in large companies, a number of different systems are used. For each system, a special interface must be implemented, which is a time consuming task. This thesis presents a solution to the problems mentioned above with AWA, an agent based workflow architecture. The general idea of AWA is to use mobile agents to control the workflow. This is done by defining specialised agents that work in team. For each new process instance, a new kind of agent is created who controls the overall process by creating new agents. One focus of this work is security. On the one hand, all agents running on a system can be attacked from this system, on the other hand, a company must protect a system not only from outside but also from inside attacks. Therefore, an editor is presented that can be used to model security rules graphically. A close description of the prototype AWA/P, who implements the AWA architecture, closes this thesis.

Ein flexibles und sicheres agentenbasiertes Workflow Manage...

Ein flexibles und sicheres agentenbasiertes Workflow Management System

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