Agent-based workflow modeling for distributed component configuration and coordination

With the emergence of component-based technologies, there is a push toward software reuse. Reusable software components, such as Java Beans, ActiveX components, COM objects, registry services, etc., can be used to support a wide variety of distributed services. The reuse of such components has reduced the need for full lifecycle development and deployment, both in research and industry. Such “top-down” approaches are becoming impractical, while there is the increasing trend toward integrating reusable components from bottom up. Furthermore, the use of technologies like introspection and reflection has relinquished the design-time constraint of having source code in order to integrate such components. The implications of the aforementioned technologies suggest that future development processes will reside on the end-user's workstation. Consequently, end-users will produce their own systems as a product of configuring multiple 3rd party components (i.e. software “plug-and-play” [18]). With this in mind, the remaining problem is how to automate this configuration to respect some user-determined policy of interaction.; One such policy is the implementation of workflow. Workflow Management Systems (WFMSs) are software systems that orchestrate a set of software services to execute a sequence of steps in performing a complex business process. Distributed workflow environments are generally comprised of pools of distributed services. These distributed services represent the resources for performing the individual workflow steps.; In large-scale workflow systems, it is inevitable for functional and non-functional requirements to change, new services to enter the system, and reconfiguration to occur based on failures. In each case, the run time evolution of system components is dependent on the ability to re-specify the workflow schema and system attributes then dynamically reconfigure the system to comply with these changes.; This thesis describes a specification-driven approach, Workflow Automation through Agent-based Reflective Processes (WARP), to configuring components according to workflow. This approach entails a process and agent-based architecture and implementation that supports the “bottom-up” configuration, reconfiguration, and workflow-based management of reusable component-based distributed services. This approach contributes to the state of the art by detailing a unique reusable process, agent-based architecture, design, and implementation for workflow coordination. Unlike other work, the WARP approach formalizes Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams to explicitly specify workflow interactions both functionally and nonfunctionally. Furthermore, there is a unique process of operational weaving that combines functional and nonfunctional workflow concerns at run-time.; The WARP approach is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Software has evolved to the design and development of modular components. The WARP approach is toward the creation of a framework that will facilitate the coordination of these components in the context of workflow.