Designing and Implementing a Multi-Agent Architecture for Business Process Management

Abstract. This paper presents a general multi-agent architecture for the management of businessprocesses, and an agent design that has been implemented within such a system. The autonomy of the agents involved in the system is considered paramount. Therefore, for agents to agree on the distribution of problem solving effort within the system they must negotiate. The knowledge sharing and negotiation functions of such an agent are focused on in this paper.