Using agent teams to model enterprise behaviour

Service Oriented Architectures have enabled enterprise architectures to be composed as loosely coupled collections of applications that interact using platform independent web services and standards. Enterprise behaviour is then traditionally modelled as workflows, with business requests invoking specific enterprise services. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, where enterprise behaviour is modelled as goals to be achieved by dynamically formed teams. These teams can be formed within an individual enterprise or can span enterprises, thus enabling virtual enterprises to be explicitly modelled. Team behaviours are specified independently of the actual services that are available, thus providing a clear separation between behaviour specification (business process definition) and behaviour execution (business process operation). The team modelling framework that is used is JACKTM Teams, which is a component of the JACKTM Intelligent Agents product suite [1].