An agent-oriented approach to process partition and planning in migrating workflow systems

Mobile agents act as the task executors in migrating workflow system. As the size of workflow is increased by including many tasks and branches, multiple mobile agents should be used where each agent is responsible for a branch of the workflow process and fulfills the workflow goal by cooperating with its partners. In this case, the workflow process needs to be partitioned into a set of sub-processes before execution so that each sub-process can be assigned to one mobile agent. This paper proposes a structured process partition approach that includes process structure partition and Quality of Service(QoS) objective partition. The former partitions a structured process into a set of sub-processes with dominant relations and each sub-process consists of a sequence of tasks. The latter distributes QoS objectives, such as the expected budget or deadline of the whole workflow, over all of the sub-processes. In addition, a sub-process execution planning algorithm with QoS objective based on Markov Decision Process (MDP) is also put forward in this paper. The experiment results show that the effects of workflow partition method and MDP based process planning method are sound.