Problem Statement

The interaction of human users with complex systems is a common issue in the age of distributed information systems. Automated business processes, which are coordinated by embedded workflow management systems call for automated supervision and control, in order to effectively relieve human workers from potentially monotonous monitoring tasks. So far, existing systems provide mechanisms for exception handling and escalation control, but do not provide process information according to the different information requirements of different classes of users (e. g., administrators, controllers, managers).

For example, the monitoring and auditing interface of current workflow management systems provides users with detailed information about running and completed workflow instances. However, the reasoning about the behavior of the workflow instances, or the system as a whole, is left to the user, since the monitoring interface only provides information about the occurrence of certain events, but not their cause.

Project Description

We develop a monitoring agent that is capable of registering itself to an internal or cross-organizational workflow, record the events that occur during the enactment of workflow instances and report back to the user with information that matches the user’s information requirements profile. For this purpose the agent should be able to modify its behavior according to the conditions it encounters during its deployment. The agent may need to cooperate with other agents in order to obtain a holistic view of the entire process. In particular, the agent should be able to record a stream of events over time and provide reasoning about the occurrence of these events, i. e., ideally the agent should be able to answer questions such as “why is this activity overdue?” The monitoring agent provides its services through a web service interface.