The Implementation Of Business Process Integration Framework Based On Multi-Agent System

There are three levels in promoting enterprise IT application: Information Integration, Business Process Integration, and Enterprise Integration, and Business Process Integration covers most of the present research. There has been a framework for enterprise application integration based on Multi-Agent system, implemented with the Agent model based on blackboard structure and Agent Pattern Language (APL), but without the characteristic of Business Process Integration.We implement the integration towards Business Process in the Multi-Agent framework based on the general structure and characteristics of Business Process. First, the concepts of our framework (roles and actors, actions and processes) allow business analysts to capture enterprise knowledge and descript business process in a way that is intuitive. Business Process is divided to sub processes recursively according to roles, and the sub processes will be scheduled to implement the upper process by the interactive cooperation between roles. The action plans of process and sub processes are composed of activities which are classified into two groups: basic activity and structured activity. Basic activity, which is completed by invoking the corresponding component, is the smallest unit in business process; and structured activity, into which logic relations are embedded on the basis of basic activity, reflects the structure of process. The focus of this paper is the structured activity.Secondly, a layered business logic model is presented, which allows the business logic to be separated from business executing. In this way, the framework is able to perform the integration of complex business process as well as to adapt easily when some segment of the process or business rule is changed. Moreover, the graphical user interface of business process developed in Eclipse as a model is completed based on graphical editor of APL. Provided the components corresponding to structured activities, business analyst drag them and set parameters graphically in the editor to produce the model of business process, and the corresponding APL description file will be generated automatically.Finally, by the implementation in a typical scene, how to divide the process based on role and activity and how to descript the process in APL file is illustrated in detail. Therefore, business process integration is implemented in our framework by the means of describing the process based on the model built by business analyst and then starting the Multi-Agent system on the JADE platform.