A generic multi-agent system platform for business workflows using Web services composition

This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow enactment mechanism from a BPEL4WS specification. This work demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (LCC protocol) (D. Robertson, 2004) can be derived from a BPEL4WS specification to enable business workflows using Web services composition. The key difference between our system and other existing multiagent based Web service composition systems is that our approach starts from a business process model which gives us an overview of the task being performed. All the participants in our system are generic agents that have no knowledge of any particular Web service. The only knowledge that they have is how to execute the interaction protocol and invoke the Web services properly. In addition, our approach makes it possible to avoid the single point of failure problem associated with a centralized workflow engine as it is based on decentralized computing paradigm.