Mobile Agent Itineraries and Work ow Nets for Analysis and Enactment of Distributed Business Processes

An agent s itinerary describes the tasks of the agent and the locations where those tasks are to be per formed Work ow technology is an important area of electronic commerce Work ow nets WF nets a class of Petri nets have been used to specify and ana lyze intra and inter organizational work ow process We investigate the correspondence between an algebra of mobile agent itineraries and WF nets We illustrate how WF nets can be used to provide a semantics for itineraries and point out bene ts of this semantics This semantics complements an operational semantics of itineraries suggesting a methodology for an imple mentation of distributed work ows from speci cation and analysis in WF nets to mobile agent based exe cution We outline two ways of using such Petri nets with itineraries as explorations towards this method ology