Pankaj R. Telang

Specifying and Verifying Cross-Organizational Business Models: An Agent-Oriented Approach

Cross-organizational business processes are routine in todays economy. Of necessity, enterprises conduct their business in cooperation to create products and services for the marketplace. Thus business processes inherently involve autonomous partners with heterogeneous software designs and implementations. Therefore, it would be natural to model such processes via high-level abstractions that reflect the contractual relationships among the business partners. Yet, in todays IT practice, cross-organizational processes are modeled at a low level of abstraction in terms of the control and data flow among the participants. This paper makes the following contributions. First, it proposes a simple, yet expressive, declarative way to specify business models at a high level based on the notion of commitments. Second, it shows how such a high-level model maps to a conventional operational model. Third, it provides a basis for verifying the correctness of the operational representations with respect to the declarative business model using existing temporal model checking tools. This paper validates the above claims using the well-known Quote To Cash business process, e.g., as supported by vendors such as SAP and applied in large enterprises. In this manner, this paper helps bridge the gap between high-level business models and their IT realizations.

Relating goal and commitment semantics

Whereas commitments capture how an agent relates with another agent, (private) goals describe states of the world that an agent is motivated to bring about. Researchers have observed that goals and commitments are complementary, but have not yet developed a combined operational semantics for them. This paper makes steps towards such a semantics by relating the respective lifecycles of goals and commitments. We study how the the concepts cohere for one agent and how they engender cooperation between agents. We illustrate our approach via a real-world scenario in the domain of aerospace aftermarket services. We state how our semantics yields important desirable properties, including convergence of the configurations of cooperating agents, thereby delineating some theoretically well-founded yet practical modes of cooperation in a multiagent system.

Enhancing Tropos with Commitments

This paper motivates a novel metamodel and methodology for specifying cross-organizational business interactions that is based on Tropos. Current approaches for business modeling are either high-level and semiformal or formal but low-level. Thus they fail to support flexible but rigorous modeling and enactment of business processes. This paper begins from the well-known Tropos approach and enhances it with commitments. It proposes a natural metamodel based on commitments and a methodology for specifying a business model. This paper includes an insurance industry case study that several researchers have previously used.

Abstracting and Applying Business Modeling Patterns from RosettaNet

RosettaNet is a leading industry effort that creates standards for business interactions among the participants in a supply chain. The RosettaNet standard defines over 100 Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) through which the participants can exchange business documents necessary to enact a supply chain. However, each PIP specifies the business interactions at a syntactic level, but fails to capture the business meaning of the interactions to which they apply.

Engineering Service Engagements via Commitments

A service engagement describes how two or more independent parties interact with each other. Traditional approaches specify these interactions as message sequence charts (MSCs), hiding underlying business relationships and, consequently, complicating modification. Comma is a commitment-based approach that produces a business model drawn from an extensible pattern library and yields flexible MSCs. An empirical study shows that models produced via Comma yield superior flexibility, are comprehensible to others, and take less time and effort to produce. The Web extra presents the claims regarding Commas effectiveness as a set of alternative hypotheses, as well as the complete list of MSCs developed via both traditional and Comma approaches.

Combining Practical and Dialectical Commitments for Service Engagements

We understand a service engagement as a form of collaboration arising in a sociotechnical system (STS). Although STSs are fruitfully modeled using normative abstractions such as commitments, a conventional (practical) commitment can capture only part of the story, namely, a debtor’s promise to the creditor to bring about the consequent if the antecedent holds. In contrast, in a dialectical commitment, which we highlight, a debtor asserts to the creditor that the consequent is true if the antecedent is. For example, a customer may dialectically commit to a seller that the product she received is damaged but may not practically commit to damaging the product. We introduce a novel bipartite operationalization of dialectical commitments that separates their objective and subjective aspects and thus avoids the problems arising if we merely treat dialectical like practical commitments. We express that operationalization in temporal logic, developing a verification tool based on NuSMV, a well-known model-checker, to verify if the participants’ interactions comply with the participants’ dialectical commitments. We present a set of modeling patterns that incorporate both practical and dialectical commitments. We validate our proposal using a real-world scenario of contradictory medical diagnoses by different specialists.

Quark: A Methodology to Transform People-Driven Processes to Chatbot Services

Human is a key cost factor in today’s service- and business-oriented processes. To reduce labor, we propose an approach to convert people driven processes to a chatbot service. Current approaches to create a chatbot service are based on formal representations or dialog based methodologies. Formal representations provide techniques for soundness verification and exception handling, however, do not provide a software methodology that capture steps for developers to build a chatbot service. Dialog based methodologies provide different step-wise approaches to create a chatbot service, however, ignore the formal aspects. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel methodology, Quark, that guides developers in producing a model that is complete and sound. Specifically, Quark takes a business process flow as input and produces a Watson Conversation model. Quark employs the notions of goals and commitments which provide a formal means for completeness and soundness. We present Quark using a change management process scenario.

Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems X: COIN 2014 international workshops

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 10th International Workshops on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2014. The workshops were co-located with AAMAS 2014, held in Paris, France, in May 2014, and with PRICAI 2014, held in Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, in December 2014. The 16 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this volume. The papers cover a wide range of topics from work on formal aspects of normative and team based systems, to software engineering with organisational concepts, to applications of COIN based systems, and to philosophical issues surrounding socio-technical systems. They highlight not only the richness of existing work in the field, but also point out the challenges and exciting research that remains to be done in the area.

GoCo: planning expressive commitment protocols

This article addresses the challenge of planning coordinated activities for a set of autonomous agents, who coordinate according to social commitments among themselves. We develop a multi-agent plan in the form of a commitment protocol that allows the agents to coordinate in a flexible manner, retaining their autonomy in terms of the goals they adopt so long as their actions adhere to the commitments they have made. We consider an expressive first-order setting with probabilistic uncertainty over action outcomes. We contribute the first practical means to derive protocol enactments which maximise expected utility from the point of view of one agent. Our work makes two main contributions. First, we show how Hierarchical Task Network planning can be used to enact a previous semantics for commitment and goal alignment, and we extend that semantics in order to enact first-order commitment protocols. Second, supposing a cooperative setting, we introduce uncertainty in order to capture the reality that an agent does not know for certain that its partners will successfully act on their part of the commitment protocol. Altogether, we employ hierarchical planning techniques to check whether a commitment protocol can be enacted efficiently, and generate protocol enactments under a variety of conditions. The resulting protocol enactments can be optimised either for the expected reward or the probability of a successful execution of the protocol. We illustrate our approach on a real-world healthcare scenario.

Modeling analytics as knowledge work: Computing meets organizational psychology

This paper reports on an ongoing interdisciplinary study of analytic workflow, describing our preliminary understanding and findings as well as some directions for further investigation and validation. Specifically, we exploit knowledge from organizational psychology to develop a computational organizational model. Our proposed organizational model provides a framework to understand the impact of organizational level variables and worker characteristics on workflow performance, providing a view to create justifiable interventions to improve performance. To evaluate the viability of the model, we develop a multiagent simulation framework and design an experimental study.