Incorporation of Agent Oriented Approaches to the Complex Process Description Methodology

The main objective of this thesis is to integrate agent oriented concepts into a complex methodology for description of business processes MMABP that is being developed on University of Economics, Prague. The first part describes and explains agent oriented approaches to business process modeling (i*/TROPOS, AOR, OOEM and UFO ontology) and demonstrates them on a case study. MMABP methodology is then compared with these approaches and evaluated. The evaluation concludes that MMABP is incomplete in relation to agent oriented concepts of plan, plan execution, desire, intention, commitment and claim and also to concepts of stable and unstable state. Concepts of goal, agent and business process are evaluated as inaccurate. Second part of the theses arguments and defines MMABP extension that eliminates identified inadequacies. Metamodel is amended with the concept of plan execution which is intentionally executed action that leads to a goal fulfillment. Plan is a description of this special kind of action. Agent is an entity that has goals and is capable of executing plans. Business process received a new definition and is defined as something that defines plans (as a prescription of actions), has goals and uses agents to execute actions. Business process is not defined as a specialization of a complex event anymore. The thesis also specifies procedure where concepts are step-by-step transformed from one diagram to another.