Using SOA provenance to implement norm enforcement in e-institutions

Abstract

In the last 10 years several approaches and echnologies other than MAS (such as Web services and Grid computing) have emerged, with the support of the industry, providing their own solutions to distributed computation. As both Web services and Grid computing are based in the concept of service orientation, where all computation is split in independent, decoupled services, there is an opportunity for MAS researchers to test and extend their mechanisms and techniques in these emerging technologies. In this paper we describe a way to adapt the HARMON/A framework to be applied in highly regulated Web services and Grid computing scenarios. To do so we include a provenance mechanism as part of our norm enforcement mechanisms, which can be integrated into a SOA Governance workflow. We will show with an example how provenance allows the observation of both service interactions and (optionally) extra information about meaningful events in the system that cannot be observed in the interaction messages. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.