ADEPT: Managing Business Processes Using Intelligent Agents

Abstract

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network services. Issues of agent visualisation are also addressed. 1. INTRODUCTION Company managers make informed decisions based on a combination of judgement and information from marketing, sales, research, development, manufacturing and finance departments. Ideally, all relevant information should be brought together before judgement is exercised. However obtaining pertinent, consistent and up-to-date information across a large company is a complex and time consuming process. For this reason, organisations have sought to develop a number of IT systems to assist with various aspects of the management...