Linkable Coordination Artifacts for Inter-Organisational Workflow

Inter-organisational workflow (IOW) is a natural scenario for MAS (multiagent system) technologies. In particular, MAS coordination infrastructures can work as a general-purpose support for WfMSs (workflow management systems): coordination artifacts can be specialised as workflow engines, encapsulating workflow rules expressed in terms of coordination laws. A network of inter-connected coordination artifacts can then be used to represent multiple, interdependent, distributed workflows, where malleability and linkability of artifacts fit the needs for dynamics in IOWs. After presenting a model of workflow engine based on ReSpecT tuple centres—taken here as examples of MAS coordination artifacts—, we introduce a distributed workflow architecture based on TuCSoN—a MAS coordination infrastructure using ReSpecT tuple centres—, exploiting a declarative workflow language, along with a scoping mechanism for workflow distribution. We show how this enables workflows to be dynamically governed and distributed upon a coordination infrastructure based on artifact linkability, first in theory, then in practice through an example of a VE (virtual enterprise) workflow built upon TuCSoN.