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A Formal Description of a Mapping from Business Processes to Agents

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Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9318))

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Abstract

Having many notions in common with multi-agent systems, business processes are well suited for modelling agents and their interrelations. However, often vague semantics and structural differences make a mapping from business processes to multi-agent systems difficult. In this paper, we formally describe a mapping from business process models to multi-agent systems that can be applied to different agent frameworks and languages. Using the same mapping, we created three semantically equivalent and interoperable implementations suiting different areas of application.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We are only regarding achieve goals here. While there are several types of goals [21], achieve goals and maintain goals are clearly the most interesting of those. Further, maintain goals can easily be emulated with achieve goals and rules, by having a rule set a new achieve goal whenever the condition to be maintained is violated.

  2. 2.

    Both artefacts and message flows are purely documentary; the actual messages are defined in the respective tasks and events sending and receiving those messages.

  3. 3.

    Subprocesses could also be defined recursively, containing a Call activity invoking the parent (sub-)process, but this is not discussed here.

  4. 4.

    Different roles (participants) might get aggregated to one agent, or another role might be implemented in several agents. Neither of this is described in the process diagram and thus has to be added in a later stage.

  5. 5.

    Depending on the implementation, the workflow might be wrapped into a separate method, service, or class.

  6. 6.

    JBoss Drools: http://www.jboss.org/drools/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Tobias Küster, Marco Lützenberger & Sahin Albayrak

Authors
  1. Tobias Küster
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  2. Marco Lützenberger
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  3. Sahin Albayrak
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Küster .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Torino, Italy

    Matteo Baldoni

  2. DEIB - Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

    Luciano Baresi

  3. Dept. of Information& Computing Sciences, Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani

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Küster, T., Lützenberger, M., Albayrak, S. (2015). A Formal Description of a Mapping from Business Processes to Agents. In: Baldoni, M., Baresi, L., Dastani, M. (eds) Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9318. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26183-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26184-3

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