Advanced Petri Nets for modelling mobile agent enabled interorganizational workflows
Sea Ling, Seng W. Loke · 2003
Mobile agents are a powerful abstraction for conceptualizing flexible large scale distributed workflows. Practically, we can use mobile agents to synchronize workflows of different organizations resulting in an interorganizational workflow. This paper discusses how mobile agent enabled interorganizational workflows can be usefully modelled using advanced Petri Net techniques such as Interorganizational Workflow Nets. This model provides a means to verify the correctness (and, so the viability) of the itineraries of agents used in enacting interorganizational workflows. We also outline an algorithm for our verification method. We also propose how Object Petri Nets can be used to properly model the agent's own itinerary differently from the overall workflow potentially permitting agent reflection on its own itinerary in case of host failures or disconnections as in mobile computing environments. We believe that such modelling can provide a formal basis for analyzing mobile agent enabled interorganizational workflows that span stationary and mobile hosts.