1999 Reports

A Mobile Agent Approach to Lightweight Process Workflow

Kaiser, Gail E.; Stone, Adam; Dossick, Stephen E.

The Programming Systems Lab at Columbia University has investigated software process modeling and enactment since its inception in the mid-1980s, initially in the Marvel project. In the early to mid-90s, we extended to cross-organizational processes operating over the Internet, in Oz and OzWeb. The successive prototype frameworks we developed and demonstrated were used on a daily basis in-house to maintain, deploy and monitor their own components, APIs and user interfaces. The new process technology first presented here is broadly based on our decade of research on and experimentation with architecting and using such prototype services and software development processes targeted to Internet/Web middleware and applications, but reflects a major departure from our own (and others') previous directions. In particular, current process and workflow systems, including our own, are often too rigid for open-ended creative intellectual work, unable to rapidly adapt either the models or the enactment to situational context and/or user role. On the other hand, the process/workflow ideal implies a flexible mechanism for composition and coordination of information system components. We now present our in-progress development of rehostable lightweight mobile agents for on-the-fly process construction, adaptation and evolution, system reconfiguration, and knowledge propagation.