Agent-based interorganisational workflow

Based on the trend to global markets, production management has to consider distributed production possibilities instead to co-ordinate local production facilities. Due to the increasing complexity inherent in the decision making Process within a distributed production, additional effort has to be spent on the co ordination of activities between autonomous production sites involved in short term co-operations. These temporal aspects will have a major impact for the configuration and mainly the operation of networks. Vendors of production management systems face the demand for applications capable of interoperating within a network of autonomous systems. This paper will give an overview of the ongoing activities within the MOKASSIN pi-eject which aims to provide an agent-based workflow system capable of solving the problems mentioned above. The focus of this paper is on the agent architecture, decision support by intelligent assistants and the conversion of existing systems into agents. Copyright (C) 1998 IFAC.