Decentralized workflow modeling and execution in service-oriented computing environment

Abstract

In this paper, workflow management technology is used to achieve business process integration. The main idea is that the services provided by the business processes of an enterprise are implemented as corresponding workflow models, which can be considered to be "black boxes", but can be subscribed and reused as subworkflows by the service requestors in defining their own workflow models. The meta model for supporting the proposed workflow modeling is given. The peer-to-peer interaction between workflow engines, the invoking of applications, and the monitoring and control of process instances can all be implemented as Web services. In order to endow this workflow management paradigm with more flexibility, multiagent technology is used to perceive environment change, and to create adapted process definition through negotiation. Agents negotiate with KQML, but the communication is implemented with Web service model. The interfaces of the agents are defined with WSDL. KQML messages are mapped into SOAP messages.