pax

With on-line ordering and electronic commerce, the Internet moves from a passive information role to an active role as a computational medium for supporting the execution of business processes. This study is motivated by this trend and it investigates agent oriented and role based business process management for computational media. In this thesis, a conceptual framework for agent oriented and role based business process management has been established. We view a business process as a collection of autonomous, problem solving agents which interact with other agents when they have interdependencies. In particular, we model a process as a set of roles and a set of conversations among roles. A protocol defines a set of rules governing role-interaction in a conversation. We define roles in term of goals, qualifications, obligations, permissions, and relations to other roles, etc. Roles are assigned to agents based on the evaluation of qualifications and agents' capabilities. Once a role is assigned to an agent, the agent becomes the subject of the rights and duties specified by that role. Coordination of processes is achieved by communication among agents. Moreover, the main constructs of the role-based process description language have been identified. The role based approach for developing agent oriented business process management systems has been developed. An agent is an active entity whose state is viewed as consisting of mental components such as beliefs, capabilities, choices, and commitments. We have shown our role model matches with the agent's mental components perfectly. We supplemented our conceptual framework with practical dimension which leads us to build the agent enhanced peer review process management system. In the case study, we have presented the standard peer review process, discussed the administrative peer review process and ad hoc peer review process, and analyzed the Internet peer review process. Thereafter, the agent enhanced peer review process has been developed. We have modeled the process with Role Activity Diagrams and Finite States Machines. Then obligations of roles and protocol rules of conversations have been derived from them. Furthermore, a general set of messages for the agent enhanced peer review process has been defined and a deontic specification of the protocols has been shown. Finally, the peer review process management system is designed as a Multi-agent system. The work has both practical and theoretical implications. The result contributes to the study of Computational Media, Multi-agent systems, and Business Process Management as well. From the work, we have found that agent oriented processes take a distributed, and thus a more robust, flexible, and scaleable approach to business process management. Business processes and the Internet are more effective in combination than alone. Electronic Commerce and many other "Virtual organization" applications can be easily imagined.

Agent oriented and role based business process management f...

Agent oriented and role based business process management for computational media

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