An intelligent multiagent system for the management of strategic business processes

Strategic processes are high-level business processes; they are distinct from production workflows. Strategic processes are opportunistic in nature whereas production workflows are routine. Strategic business processes are decomposed into goal-driven sub-processes and emergent sub-processes. An intelligent multiagent system manages strategic business processes. Each player is supported by an agent. The system manages goal-driven sub-processes and manages the commitments that players make to each other during emergent sub-processes. Commitments are derived through a process of inter-agent negotiation that considers each individual's constraints and performance statistics. The conceptual agent architecture is a three-layer belief-desire-intention (BDI), hybrid architecture. The system adapts its behaviour on the basis of performance estimates that are provided by the individual agents in contact net style bids for work. The system has been trialed on business process management in a university administrative context.