Title page for ETD etd-02212007-151123

Type of Document

Master's Thesis

Author

Chakravarty, Payal ,

Author's Email Address

payalc5@yahoo.com

URN

etd-02212007-151123

Title

An Event-Driven Approach to Agent-Based Business Process Enactment

Degree

Master of Science

Graduate Program

Computer Science

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Dr. Munindar P. Singh	Committee Chair
Dr. James C. Lester	Committee Member
Dr. Xiaosong Ma	Committee Member

Keywords

event-driven architecture
multiagent system
business process monitoring
AAMAS

Date of Defense

2007-02-23

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

Agents enacting business processes in large open environments need to adaptively accommodate
exceptions and opportunities. Work on multiagent approaches can flexibly model business processes. This thesis proposes an event-driven architecture that enriches such models with events to support agile enactment of processes.
Specifically, we place this architecture in a business process framework based on protocols
and policies, where agents? behaviors are specified via rules. The agents interact via
messages, and agreements between them are modeled by commitments. These messages
and commitments provide only a high-level view of the interactions and fail to capture
fine-grained details of how the interactions were carried out and whether they were carried
out smoothly or not. There might be hindrances due to internal and external influences
during the process, resulting in anomalies in the business process enactment. Handling
such exceptions or capturing opportunities will deviate the protocol from its routine path
but restore the enactment process to a stable state. We attempt to achieve this by introducing
fine-grained event monitoring at specific points of the process enactment that require
special attention. Detected exceptions are handled by the agent?s policies. Monitoring
processes and thereby recovering from errors spontaneously, results in a more reliable and
proactive distributed system.
The contributions of this thesis include (1) an event-driven architecture, (2) a specification
language that combines event logic with rules, (3) a methodology to incorporate
events into a protocol for fine-grained monitoring, (4) an algorithm to help a designer derive high-level (complex) event patterns, (5) an algorithm to manage subscriptions to low-level
events, and (6) policy-driven exception handling. This approach is applied on a well-known
business scenario. A proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented to demonstrate the
feasibility of the architecture. Some experiments have been carried out to demonstrate the
different perspectives of commitments and different scenarios under which event monitoring
proves to be useful.

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