THREE-SEGMENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE USING JIM FOR WORKFLOW

摘要

This agent architecture represents a distributed software solution for creating, using, and displaying the information necessary to model an industrial workflow process. It is composed of a Process Components segment to handle server-related tasks, a Workflow Definer to provide the client a graphical user interface (GUI) to assemble activities, and a Worklist Manager to provide the client a GUI to execute a workflow process. The implementation used Sun Microsystems Jini technology and JavaSpaces in a distributed environment. The advantages of this architecture are that it facilitates software development among three similar groups of software developers, supports widely distributed workgroups through interoperability among diverse workflow, implementations, and is robust with respect to recovery in the case of a crash within the network. The use of JavaSpaces also makes the architecture amenable to the use of remote agents.