Inferring, Validating, and Coordinating the Commitments in aWorkflow

Abstract

A workflow can be represented as a set of Web services and a specification for the control and data flows among these services. It can also be represented as a colored Petri net (CPN), which is a graphical and mathematical modeling tool. In multiagent systems (MAS), a workflow is a dynamic set of tasks performed by a set of agents to reach a shared goal. We show herein that commitments among agents can be used to model a workflow and coordinate their execution of it. This paper presents methodologies to map an OWLS model for a workflow to a CPN, and then to infer commitments and causal relationships from the CPN graph. With our methodologies, agents can collaboratively enact a workflow through commitment-based formalisms