A BDI-Based Reflective Infrastructure for Dynamic Workflows

Business processes (workflows) standardize frequently recurring courses of events and actions in organizations. If these business processes are optimized, the resulting improvements in efficiency and quality are multiplied throughout the respective organization as the experience of individuals is shared among all employees. It is also true that all employees of a given organization have to follow the respective process instructions unless it appears necessary to deviate from the prescribed actions in order to react to unexpected events, failures, or other exceptions the process has not been designed for. In this paper, we present our approach for reflective and dynamic workflows that are based on the BDI (belief desire intention) agent technology. Our primary goal is to introduce a new way of adaptation using sub-workflows instead of atomic changes. The second challenge we meet is the need for workflows to find and apply modifications on their own; this should also be learned at runtime.