An agent-based cross-organizational workflow architecture in support of Web services

The latest trend in system interoperability is the emerging concept of Web services. Web services promote the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent services (Web Service Description Language (WSDL)) and their locations and interactions (Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)). Using the Web services paradigm with the Internet as a medium has the potential of universal system interoperability and functional reuse. Workflow automation through agent-based reflective processes or WARP is the initial work that has the same goals in mind. WARP uses reflection and tuple-space communication to coordinate a workflow of component-based services. The goal is toward the automatic configuration and management of low-level services (component-based). This work has the most potential with respect to business-to-business interaction (B2B). In this paper, we discuss our findings in the development of WARP and briefly discuss how these findings have relevance to future use of Web services for business interactions.