Modeling service representatives in enterprise systems using generic agents

  • Authors:

  • Mehran Najafi;Kamran Sartipi

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada;Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), Oshawa, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Service Oriented Computing and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

As a common practice in business enterprise systems, a service provider delegates a human agent to a client site to serve the client. On the other hand, in a computerized business application, enterprise organizations adopt Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), where an enterprise agent is modeled as a software agent that cannot be transmitted efficiently by service messages. In the proposed approach, we extend the traditional architecture of SOA implementations to support generic and lightweight agents that reside at the client site. These agents, that we call "Service representatives", can be customized and trained based on the provider generated role description and knowledge to perform their assigned tasks. In addition to providing innovative applications, such a technique allows for more sophisticated features such as maintaining client privacy and separating the functionality of the service and its delegated agent. To indicate the variety of roles that can be done by the service representative, we provide three case studies to show how a local and generic agent can be customized by different providers to personalize financial advice, apply medical guidelines, and verify credit card transactions.