Applying Intelligent Agent Technology to Develop Coordinative Workflow Platform for Inter-organizational Applications

In this paper, we apply agent technology to develop autonomous WfMS with a separately coordinative interface to fulfill the consideration of security for inter-organizational applications. The proposed agent-based coordinative WfMS (ACWS) are implemented on a JADE platform containing three normal containers. The client container works as an agent pool to support client’s operations about submitting a product design request and communicating with the ACWS. The coordination container consists of a coordination agent to interact with client agent. It is used as a security interface separating the client and ACWS to avoid malicious attack. The workflow container includes a workflow agent group and a system administration agent to support workflow execution and system management. Finally, for demonstrating the performance of the ACWS, we present a case study that deals with order process for automobile parts design. The result shows that the proposed novel framework facilitates coordination between organizations with heterogeneous