Formal Foundations of Agentic Business Process Management

TL;DR

This paper establishes the mathematical foundations of agentic Business Process Management systems, focusing on autonomous agents pursuing explicit goals within specified process frameworks.

Contribution

It introduces formal models for agentic BPM, analyzing key problems and providing a rigorous basis for understanding autonomous decision-making in business processes.

Findings

Develops formal models for agentic BPM systems

Analyzes four foundational problems in agentic BPM

Provides mathematical foundations for autonomous decision-making

Abstract

Just like traditional BPM systems, agentic BPM systems are built around a specification of the process under consideration. Their distinguishing feature, however, is that the execution of the process is driven by multiple autonomous decision-makers, referred to as agents. Since such agents cannot be fully controlled, the process specification is augmented with explicit objectives, or goals, assigned to the participating agents. Agents then pursue these goals, at least to the best of their efforts, under suitable assumptions on the behavior of others, by adopting appropriate strategies. Centrally, the organization enacting the process can use these specifications to provide guardrails on the decision-making capabilities of agents at the strategy level. This paper sets up the mathematical foundations of such systems in three key settings and analyzes four foundational problems of agentic BPM.