Task sharing among agents using reactive rules

Abstract

Coordination and collaboration are naturally used by groups for carrying out activities and solving problems that require cooperation. However, getting a set of computer agents to do the same has been a problem-primarily addressed by the AI community and recently by the database community as workflow and process management problems. Not surprisingly, the problem has been addressed at different levels of abstraction by the two communities. It is evident that there is a need for bringing the two approaches together to develop cooperative information systems. This paper argues for the use of active databases as an enabling technology for cooperative information systems, details a novel approach for supporting task sharing (a key cooperation strategy within cooperative information systems) using active capability, and elaborates on a methodology for mapping task-shared protocols expressed in high-level speech acts to event-condition-action rules.