Engineering web service invocations from agent systems

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology that helps to bridge the gap between the theoretical foundations of agent technologies and their potential for industry-wide deployment. Agent systems are very often developed on top of a legacy system where agents have to be able to access the legacy system, usually web services, through a non-agent protocol and they have to be able to communicate with each other using an agent language. The methodology shows how existing web services can be integrated into agent systems. We have implemented tools to support the application of the methodology to mass amount of web service applications and a sample application to demonstrate the usage of the methodology and the supporting tools.