A Collaborative Mobile Agent-based Workflow System

Workflow technology is considered today as one of the key technologies for providing efficiency and consistency of organizations. The concepts of workflow embody the ideas of controlling and coordinating activities and interaction among individuals and software components. Today's workflow systems assume that each work item is executed by a single worker. From the viewpoint of the system, a worker with the proper qualifications selects a work item, executes the associated work, and reports the result. There is usually no support for teams, i.e., groups of people collaborating by jointly executing work items. In this paper, we propose the addition of a team concept to today's workflow management systems. In order to be effective support of work activities, we present a new collaborative approach for workflow systems by taking advantages of teams of mobile agents. Mobile agent is autonomous and dynamic entity that can migrate between various nodes in the network and act on behalf of a person or organization to accomplish tasks to be performed. With the help of mobile agents' collaboration, our system can manage to map closely to real world organization's processes such as collecting information, managing and collaborating work activities among workers, sharing of tasks and information, scheduling meetings which is one of the analyzed matters in an organization