Enacting the Distributed Business Workflows Using BPEL4WS on the Multi-agent Platform

This paper describes the development of a distributed multi-agent workflow enactment mechanism using the BPEL4WS[1] specification. It demonstrates that a multi-agent protocol (Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC)[8]) can be used to interpret a BPEL4WS specification to enable distributed business workflow[5] using web services[2] composition on the multi-agent platform. The key difference between our system and other existing multi-agent based web services composition systems is that with our approach, a business process model(system requirement) can be adopted directly in the multi-agent system, thus reduce the effort on the validation and verification of the interaction protocol (system specification). This approach also provides us with a lightweight way of re-design of large component based systems.