An Agent-Oriented System for Workflow Enactment Tracking

Abstract

The notion of workflows has evolved from a means to describe the flow of paperwork through an organization to a more abstract and general technique used to express best practices and lessons learned in many application domains. When putting workflow definitions into practice, it is important to stay informed which tasks are currently performed, as this allows detecting slipping schedules or unwanted deviations. In this paper, an agent-based approach for automatically tracking the set of active tasks is presented by observing the data produced during enactment. This enables short-term planning and quality control without obliging team members to explicitly document progress.