Table Of ContentExtending Web Services
Technologies
The Use of Multi-Agent Approaches
MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS,
ARTIFICIAL SOCIETIES, AND
SIMULATED ORGANIZATIONS
International Book Series
Series Editor: Gerhard Weiss, Technische Universitdt Munchen
Editorial Board:
Kathleen M. Carley, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA
Yves Demazeau, CNRS Laboratoire LEIBNIZ, France
Ed Durfee, University of Michigan, USA
Les Gasser, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey, United Kingdom
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, SC, USA
Nick Jennings, University of Southampton, UK
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts, MA, USA
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA
Michael Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom
Books in the Series:
AUTONOMY ORIENTED COMPUTING: From Problem Solving to Complex Systems
Modeling, Jiming Liu, XiaoLong Jin, and Kwok Ching Tsui, ISBN1-4020-8121-9
METHODOLOGIES AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR AGENT SYSTEMS:
The Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Handbook, edited by Federico Bergenti, Marie-
Pierre Gleizes, Franco Zambonelli
AN APPLICATION SCIENCE FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS, edited by Thomas A.
Wagner, ISBN: 1-4020-7867-6
DISTRIBUTED SENSOR NETWORKS, edited by Victor Lesser, Charles L. Ortiz, Jr.,
Milind Tambe, ISBN: 1-4020-7499-9
AGENT SUPPORTED COOPERATIVE WORK, edited by Yiming Ye, Elizabeth
Churchill, ISBN: 1-4020-7404-2
AGENT AUTONOMY, edited by Henry Hexmoor, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Rino Falcone,
ISBN: 1-4020-7402-6
REPUTATION IN ARTIFICIAL SOCIETIES: Social Beliefs for Social Order, by Rosaria
Conte, Mario Paolucci, ISBN: 1-4020-7186-8
GAME THEORY AND DECISION THEORY IN AGENT-BASED SYSTEMS, edited by
Simon Parsons, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, Michael Wooldridge, ISBN: 1-4020-7115-9
CONCEPTUAL MODELLING OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS: The CoMoMAS
Engineering Environment, by Norbert Glaser, ISBN: 1-4020-7061-6
SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT AGENTS: Creating Relationships with Computers and
Robots, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan H. Bond, Lola Canamero and Bruce Edmonds,
ISBN: 1-4020-7057-8
Extending
Web Services
Technologies
The Use of Multi-Agent Approaches
Edited by
Lawrence Cavedon Zakaria Maamar
Stanford University Zayed University
David Martin Boualem Benatallah
SRI International The University of
New South Wales
4y Springer
Lawrence Cavedon David Martin
CSLI SRI International
Stanford University 333 Ravenswood AVE
Stanford CA 94205 Menlo Park CA 94025-3493
Emai 1: leavedon @ csli. Stanford. edu
Zakaria Maamar Boualem Benatallah
College of Info. Systems School of CSE
Zayed University The University of New South Wales
P.O. Box 19282 2052 Sydney NSW
Dubai Australia
United Arab Emirates
Series Editor:
Gerhard Weiss
Institut fuer Informatik
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
Arcisstrasse 21
D-80290 Muenchen
GERMANY
email: [email protected]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Extending Web Services Technologies: The Use of Multi-Agent Approaches / Edited by
Lawrence Cavedon, Zakaria Maamar, David Martin, and Boualem Benatallah
p.cm.—(Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Societies, and Simulated Organizations, MAS A 13)
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-387-23343-1 e-ISBN 0-387-23344-X Printed on acid-free paper.
© 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.
All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the
written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, Inc., 233 Spring Street,
New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly
analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic
adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now know or hereafter
developed is forbidden.
The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks and similar terms, even if
the are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not
they are subject to proprietary rights.
Printed in the United States of America. (BS/DH)
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 SPIN 11053750 (HC) /SPIN 11330059
springeronline.com
Contents
Preface vii
1. Technologies for Business-Driven Information Technology Management 1
Vijay Machiraju, Claudio Bartolini, Fabio Casati
2. Service-Oriented Computing and Software Agents 29
Mike P. Papazoglou, Marco Aiello, Paolo Giorgini
3. OWL-S and Agent-Based Systems 53
David Martin, Mark Burstein, Sheila Mcllraith, Massimo Paolucci,
Katia Sycara
4. A Broker for OWL-S Web Services 79
Massimo Paolucci, Julien Soudry, Naveen Srinivasan, Katia Sycara
5. Agent-Based Web Services for Interoperability with the Web-Centric
Enterprise 99
Margaret Lyell
6. KAoS Semantic Policy and Domain Services: An Application of DAML
to Web Services-Based Grid Architectures 119
M. Johnson, P. Chang, R. Jeffers, J. Bradshaw, M. Breedy,
L. Bunch, S. Kulkarni, J. Lott, N. Suri, A. Uszok, V.-W. Soo
7. Agent-Based Support for Service Composition 139
Zakaria Maamar, Quan Z. Sheng, Boualem Benatallah
VI
8. Quality-of-Service Based Grid Communities 161
OmerF. Rana, AsifAkram, Rashid Al-Ali, David W. Walker,
Gregor von Laszewski, Kaizar Amin
9. Enabling Flexible Interaction with Web Services 187
Liliana Ardissono, Giovanna Petrone, Marino Segnan
10. Composing Workflows of Semantic Web Services 209
Mikko Laukkanen, Heikki Helin
11. Composing Web Services using an Agent Factory 229
Debbie Richards, Sander van Splunter, Frances M.T. Brazier,
Marta Sabou
12. Brokerage for Mathematical Services in MONET 253
Walter Barbera-Medina, Julian Padget, Marc Aird
13. Utilizing Web Services in an Agent Based Transaction Model 273
Tao Jin, Steve Goschnick
14. On Building Robust Web Service-Based Applications 293
Rosa Laura Zavala Gutierrez, Michael N. Huhns
Index 311
PREFACE
The growth and widespread adoption of Internet technologies have enabled a
wave of innovations that are having an important impact on the way
businesses deal with their partners and customers. To remain competitive,
traditional businesses are under pressure to take advantage of the
information revolution brought about by the Internet and the Web. Many
businesses are moving their operations to the Web for greater automation,
more efficient business processes, customization, and global visibility.
Web services technology is an important infrastructure toolkit that is helping
businesses become more Web-oriented, and in particular to expose
application interfaces via the Web. Major standards initiatives, such as
SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, have been launched with industry-wide support,
with the aim of allowing client applications to automatically discover and
intemperate with Web services. A cottage IT industry has arisen for
developing infrastructure for robust Web services, and for addressing critical
issues such as security, reliability, and adaptability. Solutions are being
developed to allow businesses to connect to their business partners via Web
services for more effective Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions, or
within enterprises for more efficient operations.
Despite all the effort invested in Web services infrastructure and
development, the promise of loosely coupled large applications, assembled
from heterogeneous distributed services, is still a long way off. Current
industry standards do not allow a Web service's capabilities and operating
constraints to be described in a manner that enables automatic discovery and
deployment of services that satisfy complex needs. Further, some business
solutions may require composition of multiple services (e.g., flight-, hotel-,
and rental-car reservation) into a single complex service (e.g., a travel-
reservation service). General automated composition requires techniques
beyond those provided by current standard Web service technologies.
Vlll
Many of the challenges faced by the Web services community in its aim of
building tools and techniques for loosely-coupled systems have been
investigated within the Multi-Agent System (MAS) community. In
particular, research into MAS has addressed the problem of describing
capabilities for components (i.e., software agents) in an open environment;
automatically discovering and composing such components into systems that
satisfy specified needs; and managing execution to ensure robust and reliable
system performance. Some issues that are of specific critical interest to
business communities, such as security and transaction integrity, have
received less attention in MAS research; however, these are challenges that
are far from resolved in the Web services community and may also benefit
from MAS approaches.
While a Web service need not fulfill all features of a strong definition of a
software agent, the Web services approach to building complex software
systems bears similarities to agent-oriented system engineering approaches.
In particular, large systems are assembled from distributed heterogeneous
software components, each providing a specialized service or capability.
Similarly to multi-agent engineering paradigms, the design process of such
systems focuses on the declarative characterization of the software agents'
capabilities and on a message-based paradigm of interoperation.
The parallels between Web services infrastructure and Multi-Agent Systems,
and the potential for MAS techniques to impact Web services systems
engineering, has not escaped the MAS R&D community. Recent years have
seen much activity in using and extending MAS infrastructure and
technology to address issues and concerns to the Web services community.
This Volume
The stimulus for this particular volume was a workshop on Web Services
and Agent-Based Engineering (WSABE), held in conjunction with the
Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-
Agent Systems (AAMAS), held in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003. A
selection of the authors from that workshop were invited to extend and
revise their papers, and a selection of prominent researchers from the
intersection of the fields of Web services and Multi-Agent Systems were
invited to also submit papers. All papers went through multiple review
cycles. The final collection of papers covers a range of topics at the cross-
section of Web services, Multi-Agent Systems, and the related area of Grid
Computing.
Preface ix
The first two chapters deal with infrastructure and architecture issues.
Chapter 1, by Casati et al, presents a framework for enabling the automated
management of an enterprise's IT infrastructure. It argues that the formula
for adaptive business-driven management is based on the basic architectural
principle of Web service orientation, and on certain key technological
ingredients such as resource virtualization. Chapter 2, by Papazoglou et al,
introduces an extended service-oriented architecture that provides separate
tiers for composing and coordinating Web services, and for managing Web
services in an open marketplace. In addition, this chapter discusses how
software agents can be used to support the functions of the extended service-
oriented architecture.
Semantic Web services, and the associated development of OWLS, is a
major sub-theme of this volume, reflecting a specifically important way in
which Multi-Agent Systems research promises to impact Web services.
Chapter 3, by Martin et al, argues that the work on Semantic Web services
provides the richer specifications of Web services needed to enable fuller,
more flexible automation of service provision and use, to support the
construction of more powerful tools and methodologies, and to promote the
use of semantically well-founded reasoning about services. This chapter
provides an overview of OWL-S (a Semantic Web services ontology and
associated techniques) and discusses its connections with work on agent-
based systems. Chapter 4, by Paolucci et al, firstly provides an analysis of
the Brokering task for Semantic Web services. It then demonstrates that a
Broker implementation based on the OWL-S standard is problematic,
arguing for an extension to the OWL-S process modeling language.
Chapter 5, by Lyell, discusses how an agent-centric system, based on the
FIPA agent standards, can interact with systems developed using other
frameworks. In particular, it presents an architecture that uses Web services
to facilitate interactions among agent-based systems and Web-accessible
legacy applications. Chapter 6, by Johnson et al, presents a fine-grained
semantic policy service for the management of Open Grid Service
Architecture (OGSA)-compliant services. This is implemented using KaoS,
an agent-based collection of services for distributed architectures.
Chapter 7, by Maamar et al, presents an agent-based methodology for
developing service-oriented applications. The authors discuss how users can
compose services and how dynamic selection of services is performed based
on criteria such as execution cost and location of resources. Chapter 8, by
Rana et al, addresses the issue of quality of service, i.e., non-functional
characteristics of services such as performance, reliability, and cost. It
presents a mechanism that can lead to more effective service discovery and
selection, including selection based on quality of service.
