Research On Agent-based Workflow Management System

With business expanding in various growing areas, as well as the expanding ofcooperation, enterprises are showing various characteristics, such as large-scale, instability,involving multiple departments’ participant in cross-enterprise, regional and evencross-country business participants. These characteristics require enterprise workflowmanagement systems to support heterogeneous environments, high stability and flexibility,and meet the business needs of high concurrency. Traditional workflow managementsystems experience high degree of coupling, while with low flexibility and weakperformance in terms of intelligence, thereby no longer meet the needs of today’senterprise business processes. As a result, it is highly required to introduce a stableworkflow management system with a more flexible process configuration and a strongprocessing capacity to support heterogeneous environments, utilizing the characteristics ofagent’s autonomy, interaction, reaction and initiative.Currently, there is a relatively great deal of research on workflow management systembased on agent technology and they have achieved certain results. However, there are acertain amount of drawbacks such as insufficient work model description, incompletemapping mechanism, unreasonable system architecture division, and lacking of practicalapplication. To tackle these drawbacks, this paper introduces the research and developmentof Agent-based Workflow Management System (Agent-WfMS). Firstly, based on theanalysis of system requirement, this paper designs a systematic architecture with5layers,including process modeling layer, process parsing layer, business executive layer,organizational structure management layer, and basic information management layer. Itdescribes the function of each level. It also introduces the functions and operatingmechanism of those agents that compose the entire system. These agents include processdefining agent, process analyzing agent, process implementing agent, organizationalstructure agent, basic information agent, data agent and resource agent. Secondly, thispaper introduces workflow model based on AOV network and ECA rules(WfM-AOV&ECA) as well as the definition of elements related to the workflow model,including3-tuple definition of WfM-AOV&ECA and10-tuple definition of activities. Themodel has been applied to Agent-WfMS system and has been proved to be effective.Thirdly, this paper designs the key technology to implement the Agent-WfMS system,including ECA rules parsing mechanism, WfM-AOV&ECA model mapping mechanism, task allocation mechanism and so on. Finally, this paper implements a JADE platform andagent development technology based workflow management system, with the features ofbusiness process visual modeling, and process execution and monitoring. The system hasbeen applied into enterprise project management.The proposed WfM-AOV&ECA model improves the ability to describe workflowdiagram, activities in the diagram, and the sequence and moving rules of the activities. Thedesign of system hierarchy, architecture, and key technologies can provide reasonablereference value to those systems of the same type. The development of Agent-WfMSsystem has remarkable stability, flexibility and certain intelligence. It has been applied intoproject management of an enterprise and it has achieved certain purposes in terms ofimproving the productivity and cross-department collaboration. The developmentmethodology and technology can be applied into development of similar systems. Thesystem itself has a high reusability, and can be applied into other areas of business processmanagement after a small range of adjustment.