Mining Agents’ Goals in Agent-Oriented Business Processes

When designing a business process, individual agents are assigned to perform tasks based on certain goals (i.e., designed process goals). However, based on their own interests, real-world agents often have different goals (i.e., agents’ goals) and thus may behave differently than designed, often resulting in reduced effectiveness or efficiencies of the executed process. Moreover, existing business process research lacks effective methods for discovering agents’ goals in the actual execution of the designed business processes. To address this problem, we propose an agent-oriented goal mining approach to modeling, discovering, and analyzing agents’ goals in executed business processes using historical event logs and domain data. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to adopt the agents’ goal perspective to study inconsistencies between the design and execution of business processes. Moreover, it also provides a useful tool for stakeholders to discover real-world agents’ actual goals and thus provides insights for improving the task assignment mechanism or business process design in general.