};
}
Program 8. Plan of Process Agent
The code segment in procedure 1 shows that the process agent reports current workflow progress to the person agent. It responds to the one mentioned in sub-section 5.3.1. The code segment in procedure 2 is activated when the result reported by the artifact agent is taskCompleted. The operations include updating the filled state and changing the string $waiting to FALSE. The plan finishes afterwards and another plan may be activated to determine the next routing decision.
Besides, according to the reported result, splitting or merging tasks may be triggered.
The code segment in procedure 3 is activated when the reported result is taskFailed. It will try to determine the next route and send the new target personID to the artifact agent again. Lastly, the code segment in procedure 4 is activated when one user cancels this flow. The way we used here is to stop the goal. Actually, there are many things needed to be further considered. Examples include as the stop authorization checking, logging, notification policy and the rollback manipulation etc.
Chapter 6. Conclusion & Future Work
Many related research works have focused on the agent-assisted conceptual models of B2B or B2C workflows, however, the primitive agent model, operational behavior and collaborations are seldom detailed. In this thesis, we aim at designing an agent-based system architecture for primitive workflows. We model the business
process scenarios as the interactions among the system components, users, and software agents, and exploit the design from the agent’s viewpoints to cope with the inappropriateness appeared in traditional WfMSs.
Besides, the system components and software agents with their contents and capabilities are all clearly illustrated. The interactions among them to fulfill the typical workflow behaviors are also shown with sequence diagrams. Furthermore, some implementation issues, such as the interfaces between components and agent script templates, about the realization of our system, are addressed explicitly.
In the future, we plan to investigate the design of the workflow definition tools from the agent’s viewpoints, since our goal is to utilize the properties and capabilities of software agents to enhance the development process of workflow-based applications. In addition, we are looking at the structure of the client tool for introducing the concept of active agents for better interface representations and manipulations.
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