Intelligent Agents in the Service-Oriented World - An Industrial Experience Report

In this paper, we present an industrial workflow system aided by a multi-agent system (MAS) framework1, which is not only able to cope with conventional service-based workflow applications, but also deal with the circumstances where additional logic is needed, or when no services can be used directly. ArguBroker is presented as the key component that bridges the gap between SOA and MAS. We also study the problems that we encountered and the lessons learned from an industrial perspective in integrating a SOA-based WfMS and an intelligent MAS.