Interaction Beliefs: a Way to Understand Emergent Organisational Behaviour

Abstract: Business processes consist of sets of individual and collaborative activities performed by agents (human of artificial) and the interactions between them. The agents have their own local beliefs and expectations about the behaviour(s) of the other agents. We represent these beliefs by using the ‘interaction belief ’ concept. We show how a designer can reason about an interaction belief, how it can be modelled and how it is constructed for the purpose of simulation and agent development. Differences between workflow modelling and agent-oriented modelling are discussed. In order to illustrate the operation of the new concept, we present a business interaction example that shows how agents, equipped with interaction beliefs, can enact a business process in a non-centralised, emergent manner. Finally, we explore some interesting future research topics that have arisen due to the introduction of the interaction belief concept.