Formal Foundations of Agentic Business Process Management
For researchers in business process management, this provides a formal framework for agent-driven processes, but it is an incremental theoretical contribution without empirical validation.
The paper establishes mathematical foundations for agentic BPM systems, where autonomous agents execute processes based on goals and strategies, and analyzes four foundational problems in three settings.
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.