Agent-oriented compositional approaches to services-based cross-organizational workflow

With the sophistication and maturity of distributed component-based services and semantic web services, the idea of specification-driven service composition is becoming a reality. One such approach is workflow composition of services that span multiple, distributed web-accessible locations. Given the dynamic nature of this domain, the adaptation of software agents represents a possible solution for the composition and enactment of cross-organizational services. This paper details design aspects of an architecture that would support this evolvable service-based workflow composition. The internal coordination and control aspects of such an architecture is addressed. These agent developmental processes are aligned with industry-standard software engineering processes. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.