(1) Title: 

AKT-TIE: 
A Distributed Knowledge-based Workflow and Constraint Solving Joint
Effort 

(2) problem context:

The modern organisations are virtual entities. People working in the
organisation are located in different places, each with different
capabilities and responsibilities. They need to work collaboratively
to accomplish tasks together to achieve common organisational
goals. Tasks that are required to be accomplish are often not trivial
that they often require specialised expertise and sophisticated
technology that is based local knowledge and experiences. It therefore
can not be taken for granted that the co-ordination and distributed
organisational operations are always carried out smoothly and
effectivly, where in fact much organisation effort must be made.

(3) The aims: 

To address the effectiveness and efficiency of co-ordination of
distributed organisational operations, Workflow and Business Process
Modelling techniques are recognised for their values. This technology
has been offered by the AIAI, The University of Edinburgh. Our aim is
to provide a distributed workflow system (agent-based) that is
enhanced by knowledge-based intelligent agents. One such specialised
agent has been provided by the Department of Computer Science,
Aberdeen University. A constraint-based problem solving agent (KRAFT
System) has been used to integrated with the distributed workflow
system. Figure 1 shows a conceptual overview of the integrated system:






(4) The Ultimate Goal of our effort: To provide a comprehensive
    support for a Virtual Organisation and between businesses 

a. To provide distributed knowledge- and semantic-based manipulation
   and collaboration;

b. To provide realisation where multiple tools are used* that
   multiple methodologies and disciplines are involved, and
   information in different domains are shared. Most importantly,
   people with different responsibilities and capabilities are working
   together to accomplish tasks, solve problems, and achieve common 
   organisational goals.     

c. The final goal is to increase the effective and efficiency of
   organisation operations that lead to the ultimate organisational 
   performance. 

* e.g. OU and Southampton's hyperlink tool, processor modeller, AKT-0,
  AKTbus, Netmeeting, I-X system, Aberdeen's tool "KRAFT" and its CSP
  solver.