Commitments and distances for inter-agent relationships in business activity management

Abstract

Business Activity Management (BAM) is becoming one of the most critical areas to transform a business into an adaptive enterprise. This paper describes the design of BAM Agents based on commitment and distances. BAM Agents are viable self-governing entities and are usually goal-oriented entities. BAM Agents themselves can serve as the modeling entities of describing the behavior of organizations, users, and systems. BAM Agents can in fact also serve as run-time entities with clear definitions of goals, capabilities and constraints. Many forms of relationships can be established among BAM Agents. Two specific relations are depicted in this paper: commitments and distances. While commitments stand for contractual agreements and responsibilities among agents, distances represent the degree of relatedness among agents. The former represents qualitative criteria between any two agents, and the latter actually describes the measurable and quantified relationships between agents. This paper gives an account of using commitments and distances for addressing the relational perspectives of BAM Agents.