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 rather ''loose'' cooperations across local and organizational boundaries. In an increasing number of cases, management of distributed business procedures reaches beyond such boundaries. This means, for most existing workflow management systems, that cooperating partners are required to give up their local autonomy. However, for cases in which business partners intend to cooperate but still need to preserve their local autonomy, process participation on the basis of mobile agents represents an appropriate mechanism. This article shows how such process integration can be achieved. It also demonstrates how the Common Open Service Market (COSM) system software can be extended in order to use petri-net based process definitions that realize mobile agents in an integrated distributed system platform.