An agent-based decentralised process management framework for web service composition

Abstract

Web service composition provision which requires efficient coordination of the execution of component services is a critical issue in service-oriented computing. Nowadays, BPEL4WS, the de facto industry standard for service compositions, is predominantly deployed in a way in which all interactions and intermediate data must go through one server. This centralised management results in problems such as poor performance, impaired reliability, limited scalability, and restricted flexibility. To address these problems, this research proposes an agent-based decentralised process management framework for Web service composition. This framework allows distributed BPEL engines, each of which is represented by a software agent, to manage the execution of relevant sub-processes, and to interact with one another directly to coordinate the execution of the whole process. Such a framework naturally reflects the distributed and dynamic features of the Web services environment and subsequently offers improved coordination support for service composition provision.