Formal verification of mobile agent based worflows

Abstract

Workflows are naturally built upon complex distributed information systems and resources. Modern workflows systems require a lot of flexibility i.e. the capability to react to changes during their execution and a great degree of adaptivity. The agent technology seems to be a good candidate to these requirements. One solution is that the workflow enactment is done by a mobile agent. These systems are so complex such as the usage of formal tools for verification, simulation and prototyping to facilitate their design and their validation is essential and of great interest. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly we discuss the importance of applying agent technology to workflows and then a new formal method based on rewriting logic is proposed to verify mobile agent based workflows and to enable their rapid prototyping.