Object-Oriented Modeling Approaches to Agent-Based Workflow Services

With the increasing popularity of component-based services and semantic web services, the idea of specification-driven service composition is becoming a reality. With the distribution of these autonomous services, a realizable goal will be the transformation of the Internet into a universal service repository. In such an environment, intelligent agents can play a significant role in configuring and enacting the workflow composition of the atomic distributed services to create entirely new higher-level services. In this work, there is a large-scale agent-based architecture to support such a distributed service environment. Furthermore, we introduce an object-oriented modeling and software engineering approach towards the development, configuration, and operational control of the agents that manage processes in this cross-organizational workflow environment.