Agent-based coordination support for business processes

Since organizations are becoming more and more modular (e.g. virtual enterprises) efficient coordination mechanisms are increasingly important. Certain decision problems for the management of inter- and intra-organizational business processes, e.g. coordination of human resource allocation or coordination of task scheduling, can be structured in a way that software support is feasible to a high degree. Agent based systems using the Inter-, Intra- or Extra-net offer the possibility to even induce intelligent behavior. This paper introduces a framework to model the coordination behavior of a modular agent-based system for intelligent automated coordination. The approach refers to a current research project called ‘efficient electronic coordination in the service sector’ funded by the German National Research Agency.