Engineering Business Processes through Accountability and Agents
Abstract
A business process (BP) is “a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment. These activities jointly realize a business goal.” [26]. In general, a business goal is achieved by breaking it up into sub-goals, which are distributed to a number of actors. Each actor carries out part of the process, and depends on the collaboration of others to perform its task. Multiagent Systems (MAS), in particular models for MAS organizations (MAO), are promising candidates to supply the right abstractions for describing BPs; however agent organizations still lack a systematic way to properly handle feedback of the execution of business processes in terms of good or bad functioning (e.g. exceptions). When a fedback occurs, the agent which can handleit (or which is interested to know), may be not the same agentwho triggers the feedback.