Providing an Agent Flavored Integration for Workflow Management

摘要

This paper discusses an application of software agents to improve workflow management systems, with a practical emphasis on Petri net-based systems. The properties of agent technology will be used to gain advantages within the workflow management systems on both a conceptual and practical level. In this paper we discuss the theoretical background of our work, the conceptual idea and approach, and one possible practical implementation. As a central practical means we use reference nets, a high-level Petri net formalism. These nets are used to model both agents and workflows, which results in a clean and natural integration of both technologies.