Towards Adaptive Workflow Enacment Using Multiagent Systems

• Idee:
o Workflows zijn te rigide: onmogelijk om aan te passen aan onverziene omstandigheden
o Using BPEL4WS to implement multiagent systems which can adapt to changing of
environmental conditions
= contribution to enterprise integration

• Relatie met vorige papers:

o Sessie 1: CSCW  groupware
o Sessie 3: WfMS
o Sessie 5: Uiteraard: Information integration (Contrast: adapters = niet adaptief!)
o Sessie 6: BPEL4WS
o Sessie 7: SOA (deze paper optimalizeert SOA) + ESB (OWL zou functie van ESB moeten
kunnen overnemen)

Introduction

• SOA and Web Services = Servicization: Web Services = next generation enterprise components

• ADAPTIVE WORKFLOW ENGINES = WEB SERVICES + AGENTS

o Enterprise integration: use of multiagent systems for flexible enacment of enterprise
workflows = adapting intelligently to changing environmental environments
 BPEL4WS used for expressing the initial social order of the multiagent system

Enterprise software

• Enterprise applications: CRM, SCM, ERP, …

• EAI = Enterprise Application Integration

o Enable the sharing of data across organizational, system, and application boundaries

• Enterprise software architecture trends

o Enterprise software architecture has evolved in step with IT-trends (fig1)
o Agent oriented software abstraction  certain influence on enterprise software architectures

• Web Services as enterprise software components

o How to compose the building blocks into larger structures?  composition standards
o Composition of Web Services = workflow

Workflow Management Systems

• Adaptive workflow in context

o Adaptive workflow needs are driven by demands in B2B and B2C
o On-the-fly alignment of business partners
 Loose collaborations operating in open, non-regulated B2B/B2C scenarios
o Web service based workflows
 Often behind firewalls, intra-organizational
 But: evolve to Internet-based workflows
• Coordination mechanism must become more fault tolerant!

• Workflow reference model

• Workflow tools
o BPEL4WS poised to become the target Process Description Language for the next
generation of workflow design tools

BPEL4WS
• Herhaling
DAML-S

• Problem with BPEL4WS

o Focused on expressing the mechanics of the workflow, NOT ITS SEMANTICS

= geen volledige oplossing om workflows te bouwen met Web Services

o Voorstel: DAML-S = Darpa Agent Markup Language for Services

 Machine-interpretable, ontology backed semantic description of atomic AND
composite web services
• Discovery
• Invocation
• Composition of web services
• Interoperation
• Execution monitoring

 Example
 Relationship with BPEL4WS
• Overlap, maar compatible (ZIE PAPER: mapping BPEL4WS2OWL!)

Agent-based workflow approaches

• Use semantic web services as external behaviour for proactive agents

• “If a collection of sociable agents, representing individual services, cooperate and coordinate they
would have the capability to enact any workflow that is composed of the represented services.”
• Workflow enactment by a MAS can be viewed as an act of cooperative solving.

What Is The Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily

processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of
representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.

The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML.
There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) working to improve,
extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already
been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and
although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus
about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

What's the rationale for such a system? Data that is geneally hidden away in HTML files is often useful
in some contexts, but not in others. The problem with the majority of data on the Web that is in this
form at the moment is that it is difficult to use on a large scale, because there is no global system for
publishing data in such a way as it can be easily processed by anyone. For example, just think of
information about local sports events, weather information, plane times, Major League Baseball
statistics, and television guides... all of this information is presented by numerous sites, but all in HTML.
The problem with that is that, is some contexts, it is difficult to use this data in the ways that one might
want to do so.

So the Semantic Web can be seen as a huge engineering solution... but it is more than that. We will find
that as it becomes easier to publish data in a repurposable form, so more people will want to pubish
data, and there will be a knock-on or domino effect. We may find that a large number of Semantic Web
applications can be used for a variety of different tasks, increasing the modularity of applications on the
Web. But enough subjective reasoning... onto how this will be accomplished.

The Semantic Web is generally built on syntaxes which use URIs to represent data, usually in triples
based structures: i.e. many triples of URI data that can be held in databases, or interchanged on the
world Wide Web using a set of particular syntaxes developed especially for the task. These syntaxes are
called "Resource Description Framework" syntaxes.

• “We believe that the advent of the semantic web and the emergence of a Web Services
component model can facilitate agent-based workflow management in dynamic real-time
environments. If agents use semantically described Web Services, then the semantic service
descriptions become the basis for determining the agent’s first-order abilities. Likewise, a
common semantic markup for Web Services will facilitate effective communication between
 agents. Social agents that have access to an ontology-backed semantic description of their
behaviors should be better able to proactively coordinate themselves at the macro-level.

• BPEL4WS for multiagent systems

o Semantic web not yet reality
o MAS for workflow enactment?  Yes
 Use BPEL4WS to describe the process to impose an initial social order upon a
collection of agents.
 Relationships between web services in the workflow are embedded in the process
logic of the BPEL4WS file
• Extract this relational information by constructing and partitioning a
PetriNet for the workflow
• Probleem:
o Mapping is niet volledig: well-formed workflow process
noodzakelijk

o Architecture for MA enactment of the example workflow

 FIPA

• Multiagent workflow enactment as an autonomic system

o Autonomic computing: remove complexity from the end-user and embed it in the
infrastructure of the system
o Sophisticated self-governing processes
 Self-configuration
 Self-optimization
 Self-healing
 Self-preservation

o Examples (to be explored)

 Adjustable autonomy in production workflows & CSCW (self-configuring)
 Self-optimization
 …

Related developments

• Use semantic web services as external behaviour for proactive agents