Service-Oriented Architectural Framework for Support and Automation of Collaboration Tasks

Due to more and more demanding requirements for business flexibility and agility, automation of end-to-end industrial processes has become an important topic. Systems supporting business process execution need to enable automated tasks execution as well as integrate human performed tasks (human tasks) into a business process. In this paper, we focus on collaboration tasks, which are an important type of composite human tasks. We propose a service-oriented architectural framework describing a service responsible for human task execution (Human task service), which not only implements collaboration tasks but also improves their execution by automated and semi-automated decision making and collaboration based on ontologies and agent technology. The approach is very generic and can be used for any type of business processes. A case study was performed for a human task intensive business process from an electric power transmission domain.