Business Conversations: A high-level system model for agent coordination

In this paper we introduce Business Conversations as a high-level software structuring concept for distributed systems where multiple autonomous agents (possibly in different organizational units) have to coordinate their long-term activities towards the fulfillment of a cooperative task. We first motivate Business Conversations as a system model suitable for the description of human-human, human-software as well as software-software cooperation. We then explain why we consider this model be more suitable for the description o organizational cooperative work than software-centered object models. The core concepts of the Business Conversation model are described using an object-oriented model. Finally, we report on our experience gained building a prototypical agent programming framework with Business Conversations for agent coordination based on mobile and persistent threads as provided by the persistent programming language Tycoon.