Subject-Oriented Modeling and Execution of Multi-agent Business Processes

Abstract

This paper addresses a gap in handling multi-agent business processes that has prevented their larger-scale adoption in practice: the lack of a conceptual modeling approach that is easily understandable by business domain experts and sufficiently formal for direct transformation into executable systems. The emerging paradigm of subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM), which has been evaluated through academic research and is increasingly deployed in commercial applications, has the potential to augment multi-agent system (MAS) models with a process-centric layer that preserves autonomy and concurrent interaction of agents as essential system characteristics. In this paper we provide an aligned meta-model and illustrate its operational benefits with examples from business process applications.