In this paper we introduce Business Conversations as a high-level softwae strucuring concpet for distributed systems whee mutliple autonomous agents (posible in different organizaitonal units)have to coordinate theeir long-term activities towareds the fulfillment of a cooperative task.We first movtivtte Bussiness Conversations as a system model suitable for the description of human-human,human-software as well as software-software coooperation.We then explain why we conside this model be more suitable for the desicription o organizaitonal cooperative work than software-centered boject models.The core concepts of the Business Conversatin mdoel are described using an object-oriented model.Finally,we report on our expeience gained building a prototypical agent programming framewrok with Business Conversations for agent coordination based on mobile and persistent threads as provided by hte perosistent programming language Tycoon.
展开▼
