Flexible service composition

Abstract

Both the agent and Grid communities develop concepts for distributed computing, however they do so with different motivations. This paper demonstrates how the flexible coordination technique of interaction protocols, from the field of multiagent communication, can be used to model the processes found in scientific workflow, a typical composition problem faced by the Grid community. Our approach is founded on the adaptation of the MultiAgent Protocol (MAP) language to perform web service composition. A definition of the language and framework is presented, in order to solve a detailed scientific workflow taken from the field of time-domain astronomy. MAP offers a flexible, adaptable approach, allowing the typical features and requirements of a scientific workflow, to be understood in terms of pure coordination and executed in an agent-based, decentralised, peer-to-peer architecture. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.