Integrating Agent Services into BPEL4WS Defined Workflows

In the future, Web services and software agents will coexist in the Business Process Management solution space. In our vision, agents will have symbiotic relationships with Web services, harnessing them as externally defined agent behaviors. In this paper we detail the development of a demonstration system that transparently integrates agent services into BPEL4WS defined workflows. The development of the demonstration system illustrates the power of compositional approaches to system creation. It also serves to reinforce the importance of open standards, since the integration of the separate components is dependent upon the interoperability that standards provide. This work is an important first step toward fully integrated agent-based workflow management systems.