A novel approach for enacting the distributed business workflows using BPEL4WS on the multi-agent platform

摘要

This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow enactment mechanism using BPEL4WS specification. It demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (lightweight coordination calculus (LCC)) can be used to interpret a BPEL4WS specification to enable distributed business workflow using Web services composition. The key difference between our system and other existing multi-agent based Web services composition systems is that with our approach, a business process model (system requirement) can be adopted directly in the multi-agent system, thus reduce the effort on the validation and verification of interaction protocol (system specification). This approach also provides us with a lightweight way of re-design of large components based system.