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Future Scope

 

Future Scope – Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration with Intelligent Agents

By Michael Redford, SAP AG – 09/12/2003

Discovering new ways to think about and approach SAP's own product development, as well as stimulating discussion and the active exchange of innovative ideas. These are the goals of a new SAP-internal lecture series called "Future Scope." This event series is a mix of presentations, demonstrations, and workshops designed to give SAP employees the opportunity to experience the compelling technology and business innovations currently being developed by prestigious global research institutes – and discover what these new ideas could mean for SAP, its product portfolio, and software tools of tomorrow.

In the third lecture of the "Future Scope" series, Professor Hermann Krallmann, head of the Institute of System Analysis in Berlin, was guest speaker in SAP University's Audimax auditorium.

Prof. Friedemann Mattern

Figure 1: Prof. Krallmann

Imagine the following. A company has a market request, but is unable to process it without an additional company's help, and so someone has to pick up the phone to work out the details. Ideally, it shouldn't take a phone call, but the internal business software of the two companies would work out the details automatically. This is the idea behind "Intelligent Agents," presented by Professor Hermann Krallmann on Monday, September 8, in the Audimax in St-Leon Rot.

Prof. Krallmann, head of the Institute of System Analysis in Berlin, has been conducting research in the area of multiagent systems applied to manufacturing for some time. Intelligent Agents is the subject of his current research, and this Future Scope lecture. The goal is to decompose business processes into smaller, atomic units – business process particles – and then apply a knowledge-based approach to model business processes. Intelligent Agents are the product of this model, and they have the potential to autonomously and dynamically reconfigure business processes, leading to on-demand collaboration.

Prof. Krallmann has been a full professor at the Technical University of Berlin since 1979 and has fifteen years of research experience in the area of business technologies. At the Institute of System Analysis in Berlin, Prof. Krallmann, 55 staff members, and 1000 students collaborate with partners both in academia (for example, MIT, Stanford, the Institute of Technology in New Delhi) and in industry (for example, Sun, Ford, Intel). The current research is being carried out in cooperation with SAP; Prof. Krallmann already worked with SAP on several projects over the last few years, including helping to realize an E-learning project with SAP for Karstadt-Quelle, the German retail giant.

Prof. Friedemann Mattern

Figure 2: Prof. Krallmann on stage

The Intelligent Agents project consists of following steps:

  1. Create a framework: Analyze and decompose processes; determine common phases and common activities; classify these activities in object-oriented categories, stored in a process repository.
  2. Define the semantic systems behind the Intelligent Agents' actions: Knowledge representation; ontologies; rules or predicates; resolution calculus.
  3. Create a knowledge library: Map roles to customer requests, determine dependencies and requirements, and set the triggers for specific processes. This information is then stored in a knowledge library, shared by all parties.

After two months, Prof. Krallmann's research group was able to show the first Intelligent Agents prototype at the lecture. The scenarios were typical business processes: A customer wants to purchase a PC and desk and pick them up immediately, or a customer wants to lease a PC and desk and pick them up immediately. Members of the research team discussed the technical details of how the Intelligent Agents used public knowledge to initiate the processes and facts and rules to define the internal processes required to complete the test scenarios. A workshop was held immediately after the event, to allow employees to take a more detailed look at the technology.

In the subsequent question and answer session, members of the audience asked penetrating questions about the originality of the model and pointed out that the model largely mirrors the concept of inheritance, which is central to object-oriented programming. In addition, the audience also questioned the feasibility of the ontologies and decision calculus behind the semantic portion of the model. These questions aside, the talk pointed out a central stumbling block: because an infrastructure is missing, business processes are mostly peer-to-peer, with little or no automatic coordination among partners. Just as XML and UDDI have created generic formats for data exchange, the Intelligent Agents project, because it attempts to define business process particles and a knowledge library, will certainly further the goal of automatic business collaboration.

See also Future Scope – Tangible Information and Future Scope – A Networked World

 

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