Validating Auction Business Processes using Agent-based Simulations

Business Process Modeling and particularly modeling business processes as collaborations is one of the challenges of today enterprise software development. The industry of software development becomes more and more expensive making crucial a correct translation from business idea to implementation to allow for a complete understanding and complete exchange of information between development participants. Particularly, large established software infrastructures are critical with respect to the integration of new components. In this paper, we describe an automated mapping from Single Item English Auction BPMN model to an Agent-Object Relationship simulation towards validation of this business process. The mapping underlines the capabilities of agent-based simulations to execute business processes as well as a number of open questions with respect of BPMN collaboration models. 1 Motivation and Related Work The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) has developed a standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) [OMG08]. The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users such that business processes can be illustrated using a standard notation understandable also to business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, continuing towards technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally going on, towards the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. A complete introduction to business processes is given in [Wes07]. This work tries to narrow the gap between two different points of view underlined by two different communities: researchers with a background in formal methods interested in investigating structural properties of processes and the second group consisting of software community interested in providing robust and scalable software systems. However, building complex business processes on already existent enterprise infrastructure it might be an expensive task. Usually, corporations spent millions integrating heterogeneous applications (otherwise known as Enterprise Application Integration or EAI). Why? Because one of the best ways to generate more profits out of a company is to reduce the costs of doing business. BPMN helps us to design a business process, but is it able to guarantee the efficiency of the implementation? As stated in [WG08] the BPMN notation does not have a formal behavioral semantics, which is important in behavioral specification and behavior verification. There are several approaches that try to overcome this inconvenience. The traditional approaches are based upon Petri Nets (e.g. [vdAtHW03, vdAdMW06]), Event-driven Process Chains (e.g. [DvdAtH05]) and Workflow Nets (e.g. [HTvdAW01]). We propose a new approach for defining behavior semantics for business processes as Agent-based simulations. How can we validate a BPMN model with respect of its execution? In [Wes07] ( page 7) was argued that ”business process models are the main artefacts for implementing business processes”. In addition in [Wes07] was defined a business process management system as ”a generic software system that is driven by explicit process representations to coordinate the enactment of business processes.” On the other side in [Woo02] was argued that ”an agent is a computer system that is capable of independent action on behalf of its user or owner.”. In this context at least semantically it is obvious that the generic software system in the form of a business process management system can be in fact a multi agent system. As far as we know the literature concerning this approach is in a starting point, [EKHA07, EHKA07]. The first paper addresses a similar task as this work, while the second one abandon this approach and uses a different one by trying to normalize BPMN towards a better mapping to Petri Nets. However, the work in [EKHA07] is in a beginning stage and is not really related to the BPMN validation but towards ”to use an intuitive graphical process notation for designing multi-agent systems” (page 104). By contrast our work proposes an use case investigation i.e. a BPMN mapping to an established agent-based platform, Agent-Object Relationship (AOR) introduced in [Wag03, Wag04], with the goal of validation of BPMN based business process models. The main research behind this approach is to investigate if and to what extent BPMN can be executed in an agent-based simulation environment. There is at least one more reason, why this approach is important and adequate. According to [Wes07] ”a business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment” (page 5). Moreover, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and business process modeling go hand in hand. Very often the activities modeled within BPMN models are typically implemented as services. The relationship between agent-based simulation environments and services is a critical one since may help understanding organizational models as services. 2 Single Item English Auction Automated negotiations including here electronic auctions are very well suited to be modeled with BPMN and also with rules, and research focused on defining and on development of protocols and strategies to be used in multi agent systems that are to perform negotiations [BPJ02], [BPJ03], [JFL01],[Kra97]. The distinction between the negotiation mechanism and negotiation strategies is their access modifier. The access modifier refers to the fact that rules describing the negotiation mechanism are public and rules defining behavior or strategies are private, they belong to agents. Auctions are a form of negotiation mechanism for electronic commerce discussed also in many papers such as [RE05], [WWW01], [WWW02]. English auction also called Open-outcry auction is an ascending type of auction. It is an important type of auction discussed in a wide range of papers such as [DASK02], [DRS05], [BGW06], and we consider that the subject is far from being finished. In Single Item English auction only one item is sold at a time. Bidding is open; all participants bid against each other openly. Each successive bid must be higher than the old one. The seller begins the auction by asking for bids at a low price. Buyers bid against each other by raising the price, until only one willing buyer remains.