An intelligent agent framework for enterprise integration

The authors present a framework in which human and intelligent agents (IAs) can interact to facilitate the information flow and decision making in real-world enterprises. Underlying the framework is the notion of an enterprise model that is built by dividing complex enterprise operations into a collection of elementary tasks or activities. Each such task is then modeled in cognitive terms and entrusted to an IA for execution. Tasks that require human involvement are referred to the appropriate person through their personal assistant, a special type of IA that knows how to communicate both with humans, through multimedia interfaces, and with other IAs and the shared knowledge base. The computer-aided software engineering tools supported by a library of activity models permit every individual in an enterprise to model the activities with which they are personally most familiar. The preliminary experimental results suggest that this divide-and-conquer strategy, leading to cognitive models that are buildable and maintainable by end-users, is a viable approach to real-world distributed artificial intelligence