Formalizing workflows as cooperative agents

Chitta Baral and Jorge Lobo.

Abstract

In this paper we present a formal model to characterize cooperative agents in a workflow setting in terms of activities, description of effect of activities, and definition of activities as execution of programs and control modules. We define the correctness of a sequential control module, give sufficiency conditions about the rules in the module, and use the sufficiency conditions to give a naive algorithm to construct sequential control modules. Finally, we extend our notion of correctness to non-sequential control modules.