USING MOBILE AGENTS TO SUPPORT INTERORGANIZATIONAL WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT

This article argues that the mobile agent approach is well suited for sporadic communication in open distributed systems, especially for rat her ''loose '' cooperations across focal and organization of boundarie s. In an increasing number of cases, management of distributed busines s procedures reaches beyond such boundaries. This means, for most exis ting workflow management systems that cooperating partners are require d to give up their focal autonomy. However for cases in which business partners intend to cooperate but still need To preserve their local a utonomy, process participation on the basis of mobile agents represent s an appropriate mechanism. This article shows how such process integr ation can be achieved. it also demonstrates how the Common Open Servic e Market (COSM) system software can be extended in order to use petri- net based process definitions that realize mobile agents in an integra ted distributed system platform.