Autonomous agents for business process management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale, organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Intern et and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number o f business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design , and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management sys tem. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting vari ous components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomo us problem-solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically inte ract and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions a nd to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system tha t is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the applic ation of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom.