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Programming Software Agents as Designing Executable Business Processes: A Model-Driven Perspective

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3067))

Abstract

The contribution of this paper is fourfold. First, we sketch an architecture of agent-enabled business process management that cleanly separates between agent capabilities, business process modeling, and the modeling of services that are employed to actually implement processes. Second, we demonstrate how the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) paradigm can be beneficially employed at all three layers of the agent-enabled business process architecture. Third, we describe an instance of a platform independent model based on the new UML2 standard, and sketch a mapping to a platform dependent model based on the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS). Fourth, we point out the relationship between the programming of multiagent systems, and the design of agent-enabled business processes. Our key thesis is that designing business processes based on an agent-enabled business processes modeling and enactment framework is a useful way of programming agents – a way that may help agent technology to gain much wider acceptance in industry.

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© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Müller, J.P., Bauer, B., Friese, T. (2004). Programming Software Agents as Designing Executable Business Processes: A Model-Driven Perspective. In: Dastani, M.M., Dix, J., El Fallah-Seghrouchni, A. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3067. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25936-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25936-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22180-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-25936-7

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