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).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
IBM, BEA Systems, Microsoft, SAP AG and Siebel Systems, business Process Execution Language for Web Services version 1.1. Technical report (July 2003)
Artikis, A.: Executable Specification of Open Norm-Governed Computational Systems. PhD thesis, Imperial College London (2003)
Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D.L., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P.: The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Buhler, P., Vidal, J.M.: Integrating agent services into BPEL4WS defined workflows. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (2004)
Guo, L., Robertson, D., Chen-Burger, Y.-H.: Using multi-agent platform for pure decentralised business workflows. Web Int. and Agent Systems 6(3) (2008)
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F.: Reducing OWL entailment to description logic satisfiability. In: Fensel, D., Sycara, K., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) ISWC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2870, pp. 17–29. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U.: A tableaux decision procedure for \(\mathcal{SHOIQ}\). In: Proc. of the 19th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 448–453 (2005)
Huang, Z., van Harmelen, F., ten Teije, A.: Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies. In: Kaelbling, Saffiotti (eds.) IJCAI’05 (2005)
Klein, M., Dellarocas, C.: Exception handling in agent systems. In: AGENTS ’99: 3rd Annual Conference on Autonomous Agents, pp. 62–68 (1999)
Klein, M., Dellarocas, C.: Towards a systematic repository of knowledge about managing multi-agent system exceptions. Technical Report ASES Working Report ASES-WP-2000-01, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2000)
Klein, M., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J., Dellarocas, C.: Using domain-independent exception handling services to enable robust open multi-agent systems: The case of agent death. Auton. Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 7(1-2), 179–189 (2003)
Lanzén, A., Oinn, T.: The taverna interaction service: enabling manual interaction in workflows. Bioinformatics 24(8), 1118–1120 (2008)
Ludäscher, B., Altintas, I., Berkley, C., Higgins, D., Jaeger, E., Jones, M., Lee, E.A., Tao, J., Zhao, Y.: Scientific workflow management and the Kepler system: Research articles. Concurr. Comput.: Pract. Exper. 18(10), 1039–1065 (2006)
Mallya, A.U., Singh, M.P.: Modeling exceptions via commitment protocols. In: AAMAS ’05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pp. 122–129. ACM, New York (2005)
Motik, B., Sattler, U., Studer, R.: Query Answering for OWL-DL with Rules. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds.) ISWC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3298, pp. 549–563. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Sandhu, R.S., Coyne, E.J., Feinstein, H.L., Youman, C.E.: Role-based access control models. Computer 29(2), 38–47 (1996)
Schlobach, S., Cornet, R.: Non-standard reasoning services for the debugging of description logic terminologies. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’03), pp. 355–362 (2003)
Sirin, E., Parsia, B.: SPARQL-DL: SPARQL query for OWL-DL. In: 3rd OWL Experiences and Directions Workshop, OWLED-2007 (2007)
van der Aalst, W.: The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management. The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers 8(1), 21–66 (1998)
von Wright, G.H.: Deontic logic. Mind, New Series 60(237), 1–15 (1951)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14962-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14961-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14962-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)