Design and Implementation of Agentic Orchestrations and Orchestration of Agents

Agentic Business Process Management has gained momentum recently. The prospect is that the autonomy of AI agents, i.e., predominantly LLM-based agents, can be balanced with a certain level of robustness, tractability, and traceability through a combination with process technology. In this paper, we provide a classification framework for agentic orchestration options along properties such as task specificity, traceability and tractability, autonomy and reactivity, and correctness assurance and present qualitative decision criteria for realizations of different scenarios. We also provide metrics for the quantitative assessment of realization properties and show them through different agentic implementations of a predictive light sensing scenario. Altogether, this work aims at providing properties, criteria, and metrics for the design and implementation of agentic orchestrations and orchestration of agents.

From Internet of Things Data to Business Processes: Challenges and a Framework

The IoT and Business Process Management (BPM) communities co-exist in many shared application domains, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The IoT community has a strong focus on hardware, connectivity and data; the BPM community focuses mainly on finding, controlling, and enhancing the structured interactions among the IoT devices in processes. While the field of Process Mining deals with the extraction of process models and process analytics from process event logs, the data produced by IoT sensors often is at a lower granularity than these process-level events. The fundamental questions about extracting and abstracting process-related data from streams of IoT sensor values are: (1) Which sensor values can be clustered together as part of process events?, (2) Which sensor values signify the start and end of such events?, (3) Which sensor values are related but not essential? This work proposes a framework to semi-automatically perform a set of structured steps to convert low-level IoT sensor data into higher-level process events that are suitable for process mining. The framework is meant to provide a generic sequence of abstract steps to guide the event extraction, abstraction, and correlation, with variation points for plugging in specific analysis techniques and algorithms for each step. To assess the completeness of the framework, we present a set of challenges, how they can be tackled through the framework, and an example on how to instantiate the framework in a real-world demonstration from the field of smart manufacturing. Based on this framework, future research can be conducted in a structured manner through refining and improving individual steps.