1.1 Motive
In the eBusiness age, business environments have become exceedingly dynamic and competitive. For customer’s requests, efficient, effective, and accurate response is vital for success of an enterprise. In most organizations, requirement changes in business processes occur frequently and prevalently. The enterprises need to better operations in a state of perpetual change and adaptation. To address these requirements, enterprises must constantly reconsider and optimize how to support evolving business process [1].
Traditionally, enterprises use a bottom up and data-centric approach to construct their information system. The logic of process, application, and organization are combined together.
When a process is tightly coupled in application codes (when built from scratch) it is inaccessible and difficult to change. As a result, the cost of maintenance is high. For a manager of information system, it is a nightmare to update a system due to an additional requirements or changes in the business rules or process. Workflow is a technology that allows users to create a process layer, which provides a level of process abstraction, and removes the processes from the control of applications. It separates the process logic, application logic, and organization logic. The process is maintained independently of the core functionality of the application, the cost of maintenance is considerably lower. The information system that constructs by workflow technologies (top-down, process-centric approach) not only manages business data but also business process (people-intensive applications) and process data that provide opportunity to optimize the process.
An enterprise needs to construct a process-centric organization and information system for supporting rapid changes. Workflow can be defined as the automation of a business process during which documents, information or tasks are worked and passed from
and to other processes according to a set of procedural rules [2]. Workflow technology improves an organization’s performance in doing planned work.
Workflow management systems (WfMSs) are accepted worldwide due to their ability of modeling and controlling business processes. WfMS can effectively manage, dispatch, and coordinate activities of people working on a common task or project. WfMS ensures that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time.
Successful WfMS deployment results in significant process cycle time reductions, cost reductions, improved accuracy, greater control, and greater worker satisfaction. A workflow has been expected to spread across company boundaries on the Internet. Therefore, a technology for inter-organizational workflow becomes an important issue. Recent researches in WfMSs have been focusing on cooperative e-Business among different organizations that use their individual resources to achieve a common goal. These individual resources contain application services, business processes, and people, etc. Hence the requirements of inter-organizational workflow have emerged in medium-to-large-sized enterprises. A conventional (called intra-organizational) process is a process whose activities are all performed within the same WfMS of a single organization. An inter-organizational process contains one or more cross-organization sub-workflow (called co-process in different sites.) where each contains three process elements (process service, remote process and process for the cooperation workflows in different organizations. An inter-organizational WfMS is extended from the traditional WfMS to allow user to model inter-organizational processes and provide a workflow engine to enact, manage and monitor the execution of inter-organizational processes.
Because of the dynamic nature of e-Business, the inter-organizational WfMS must be able to accommodate the participating organizations to change their business processes and strategies dynamically, to handle events whether they are predefined or not, and to support run-time modifications of process models [3]. Task monitor is also an important tool for
WfMS to track and monitor the status and the progress of each enacted process instance.
Through task monitor, workflow participants and administrator can know each instance‘s current status and the progress of an enacted process. However, security issues between different inter-organizational WfMSs must be considered for enacting an inter-organizational process across organizational boundaries. The inter-organizational process monitor and administration must be configured with appropriate authorities for different workflow applications.
1.2 Cooperative Agentflow Process LANguage
Cooperative Agentflow Process LANguage (CA-PLAN) is designed to extend the underlying model of Process modeling LANguage (PLAN) [4] by adding remote processes, process services, and process control data as its modeling constructs, and by allowing a process in one WfMS to enact a remote process in another WfMS over network. An inter-organizational process is a process whose activities are performed to cooperate, coordinate, and interact among the processes in different organizations over the Internet. In CA-PLAN, an inter-organizational process could be partitioned into several parts which have boundary functionalities in different organizations. CA-PLAN lets a workflow system inside an organization be modeled as an Integrated Workflow Component (IWC). Each IWC contains a process service interface specifying the process services provided by the organization, to be coupled with a remote process interface specifying the remote processes used in the intra-organization processes, and intra-intra-organizational processes of the intra-organization. Process services and remote processes are input and output connector pins of an IWC. A co- process is defined as a process which contains a pair of process service and remote process supported by IWC connection between their process services and remote processes.
There are three layers for presentation and detailed handlings for an inter-organizational process. The top layer lets designer design an inter-inter-organizational process as an
intra-organizational process (i.e., processes in WfMS). The medium layer, based on Java machine, provides a communication and management mechanism to help the design implicitly. This cooperative mechanism between WfMSs in CA-PLAN is modeled as a process-specific Remote Call Process (RCP) mechanism of which it contains implicit input and output connectors with an intra-organizational process component. RCP also supports the ability to manage, control and monitor the execution of an inter-organizational process instance. Also, the bottom layer is a transport layer that may use http, web service, java RMI …etc.
1.3 Enterprise process portal
The research of software agents [5][6] during last decade has accumulated lots of outcome and demonstrated theirs applications in different areas. Software agents have several useful characteristics such as mobility, autonomy, and intelligence. They are also proactive to their executing environments. Therefore, researchers and software industry in workflow technologies, start to adopt software agents as part of the software design by viewing them as autonomous and mobile software components.
Our work only focuses on the enrichment of software agents that are directly related to the workflow platform and workspace. The enrichment allows software agents in the workflow system to make efforts on monitoring the operation workflow engine and the interaction of workflow participants. Software agents employed need more intelligence than mobility. Here, most of the software agents mentioned in the article are stationary agents (that never migrate), i.e., the agents do move on the intent sites.
The enterprise process portal (EPP) is a portal that provides user interfaces for general workflow operations, and augments traditional portal applications with relevant process information. With the ability of modular and personalized page composition for end-user screen, our workflow system can provide intelligence on the agents based on the end-user’s
preference. A sample software agent is the decision analysis agent that analyzes the user’s decision history of the same type, and takes current application data as input parameters (e.g., the payment amount and the position of applicants in the payment approval process) to suggest the decision on the application screen, and/or make the decision as the default action when the end-user intends to submit the activity and continue next step without any comments.
The software agents of that class can be added incrementally to the corresponding enterprise process portal by changing the configuration of the portal, because the independent suggestions of software agents can be displayed in their portlets of the Web page. The arrangement reduces the required efforts for the business process consultants to inject their ideas into the software agent’s knowledge. Thus, the workspace containing injected business process intelligence can help users to improve their efficiency. The process portal can be extended with more portlets.
1.4 Organization of this dissertation
The organization of this dissertation is arranged as follows. Chapter 2 presents workflow and PLAN. Chapter 3 is devoted to the concept of the cooperation workflow Model CA-PLAN. Chapter 4 describes the Agentflow architecture and design. Chapter 5 describes the implementation and related issues of a cooperative Agentflow. Chapter 6 presents an intelligent and personalized enterprise process portal. Conclusions and our future work are finally covered in Chapter 7.