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Specifying and Verifying Cross-Organizational Business Models: An Agent-Oriented Approach ∗
"... Cross-organizational business processes are the norm in today’s economy. Enterprises of necessity conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Such business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implemen ..."
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Cited by 37 (16 self)
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Cross-organizational business processes are the norm in today’s economy. Enterprises of necessity conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Such business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. Thus it would be natural to model such processes via high-level abstractions that reflect the contractual relationships among the business partners. Yet, in today’s IT practice, cross-organizational processes are modeled at a low level of abstraction in terms of the control and data flows among the participants. This paper makes the following contributions. First, it proposes a simple, yet expressive declarative way to specify business models at a high level based on the notion of commitments. Second, it shows how such a high-level model maps to a conventional operational model. Third, it provides a basis for verifying the correctness of the operational representations with respect to the declarative business model using existing temporal model checking tools. This paper validates the above claims using the wellknown Quote To Cash business process, e.g., as supported by vendors such as SAP and applied in large enterprises. In this manner, this paper helps bridge the gap between high-level business models and their IT realizations. 1
A first-order formalization of commitments and goals for planning
, 2013
"... Commitments help model interactions in multiagent systems in a computationally realizable yet high-level manner without compromising the autonomy and heterogeneity of the member agents. Recent work shows how to combine commitments with goals and apply planning methods to enable agents to determine t ..."
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Cited by 11 (2 self)
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Commitments help model interactions in multiagent systems in a computationally realizable yet high-level manner without compromising the autonomy and heterogeneity of the member agents. Recent work shows how to combine commitments with goals and apply planning methods to enable agents to determine their actions. However, previous approaches to modeling commitments are confined to propositional representations, which limits their applicability in practical cases. We propose a first-order representation and reasoning technique that accommodates templatic commitments and goals that may be applied repeatedly with differing bindings for domain objects. Doing so not only leads to a more perspicuous modeling, but also supports many practical patterns.
Specifying and Monitoring Obligations in Open Multiagent Systems using Semantic Web Technology
- in Semantic Agent Systems: Foundations and Applications, volume 344 of Studies in Computational Intelligence, chapter
, 2011
"... Abstract In nowadays open interaction systems where autonomous, heterogene-ous and self-interested agents may interact, it is crucial to be able to declaratively specify the norms that regulate the actions of the interacting parties and to be able to monitor their behaviour in order to check whether ..."
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Cited by 7 (6 self)
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Abstract In nowadays open interaction systems where autonomous, heterogene-ous and self-interested agents may interact, it is crucial to be able to declaratively specify the norms that regulate the actions of the interacting parties and to be able to monitor their behaviour in order to check whether it is compliant or not with the norms. In this chapter we propose and discuss the advantages of using semantic web languages, tools, and techniques for proposing an application independent model that should be used for the declarative specification and monitoring of obli-gations. Those obligations are characterized by a class of activation and deactiva-tion events, a class of content actions that may satisfy the obligation and a dead-line within which an action belonging to the content class has to be performed. The main contribution of this chapter is to show how it is possible to use semantic web technologies, and in particular OWL 2 DL as formal language for the specifi-cation and monitoring of complex obligations and to study how much it is feasible to use an OWL ontology to represent the state of a dynamic open interaction sys-tem. 1
Hierarchical planning about goals and commitments
- In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS). St
, 2013
"... We consider the problem of relating an agent’s internal state (its beliefs and goals) and its social state (its commitments to and from other agents) as a way to develop a compre-hensive account of decision making by agents in a multi-agent system. We model this problem in terms of hier-archical tas ..."
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Cited by 2 (1 self)
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We consider the problem of relating an agent’s internal state (its beliefs and goals) and its social state (its commitments to and from other agents) as a way to develop a compre-hensive account of decision making by agents in a multi-agent system. We model this problem in terms of hier-archical task networks (HTNs) and show how HTN plan-ning provides a natural representation and reasoning frame-work for goals and commitments. Our approach combines a domain-independent theory capturing the lifecycles of goals and commitments, generic patterns of reasoning, and do-main models. Specifically, our approach shows how each agent may take into account its capabilities, costs, and pref-erences as it plans its interactions (captured as operations on commitments) with other agents to attempt to achieve its goals.
Norms, organizations, and semantics
"... This paper integrates the responses to a set of questions from a distinguished set of panelists involved in a discussion at the Agreement Technologies workshop in Cyprus in December 2009. The panel was concerned with the relationship between the research areas of semantics, norms, and organizations, ..."
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This paper integrates the responses to a set of questions from a distinguished set of panelists involved in a discussion at the Agreement Technologies workshop in Cyprus in December 2009. The panel was concerned with the relationship between the research areas of semantics, norms, and organizations, and the ways in which each may contribute to the development of the others in
1Specifying and Verifying Cross-Organizational Business Models: An Agent-Oriented Approach
"... All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. ..."
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All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.
NCSR “Demokritos”
"... Increasingly, software engineering involves open systems consisting of autonomous and heterogeneous participants or agents who carry out loosely coupled interactions. Accordingly, understanding and specifying communications among agents is a key concern. A focus on ways to formalize meaning distingu ..."
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Increasingly, software engineering involves open systems consisting of autonomous and heterogeneous participants or agents who carry out loosely coupled interactions. Accordingly, understanding and specifying communications among agents is a key concern. A focus on ways to formalize meaning distinguishes agent communication from traditional distributed computing: meaning provides a basis for flexible interactions and compliance checking. Over the years, a number of approaches have emerged with some essential and some irrelevant distinctions drawn among them. As agent abstractions gain increasing traction in the software engineering of open systems, it is important to resolve the irrelevant and highlight the essential distinctions, so that future research can be focused in the most productive directions. This paper is an outcome of extensive discussions among agent communication researchers, aimed at taking stock of the field and at developing, criticizing, and refining their positions on specific approaches and future challenges. This paper serves some important purposes, including identifying (1) points of broad consensus; (2) points where substantive differences remain; and (3) interesting directions of future work.
doi:10.1017/S0269888912000367 Norms, organizations, and semantics
"... This paper integrates the responses to a set of questions from a distinguished set of panelists involved in a discussion at the Agreement Technologies workshop in Cyprus in December 2009. The panel was concerned with the relationship between the research areas of semantics, norms, and organizations, ..."
Abstract
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This paper integrates the responses to a set of questions from a distinguished set of panelists involved in a discussion at the Agreement Technologies workshop in Cyprus in December 2009. The panel was concerned with the relationship between the research areas of semantics, norms, and organizations, and the ways in which each may contribute to the development of the others in support of next generation agreement technologies.
