Negotiating agents for corporate-wide business process management

Summary form only given, as follows. Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale, organizationwide, dynamic settings. However with the explosion of electronic commerce applications, increasingly many business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design and implementation of a next generation, agent-based business process management system (called ADEPT). The key advance of ADEPT is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problems solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more flexible, agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, the application of the ADEPT technology to a British Telecom business process is discussed in detail.