Agents and People Activities in Web-services based Business processes

Abstract

Business Processes Execution Language (BPEL) is primarily designed to support automated business processes based on Web services. The lack of support for human-performed activities led to specification of a BPEL extension called BPEL4People which tries to answer this problem. In this paper we propose an implementation of Web services with regard to this extension using the agent technology. We show not only how agents can implement such activities but also how they can improve their execution with acting on behalf of the users they are representing. Moreover the fact that agents' behaviour is based on their knowledge this is a promising approach to knowledge management in organisations.