Coordinating multiple agents for workflow-oriented process orchestration

Distributed component-based services and semantic web services are promising technologies for next generation inter-enterprise integration. The dynamic nature of this domain presents a complex problem for tools that intend to support this cross-organizational integration. However, the autonomy and adaptation of software agents represent a viable solution for the composition and enactment of cross-organizational services. Currently, there are few studies that measure the impact of the dynamic environmental effects on service composition. On an on-going basis, composite services or workflow processes of web services may be constantly changing in terms of responsiveness of services, accessibility of services and their meta-information, business process schema changes, etc. These conditions impact what interactions a team of agents must undergo to achieve a specific process derived of composite web services. This paper describes an approach, model, and supporting software toward the efficient design of interaction protocols for coordinating agent teams in the business process orchestration domain. This approach considers several environmental conditions related to the dynamism of the Internet.