A model driven approach to agent-based service-oriented architectures

Abstract

Business process management has been identified as an interesting application area for agent technologies. Current developments in Web technologies support the execution of business processes in a networked environment. In this context, the flexible composition and usage of services in a service-oriented environment is a key feature. Additionally, the model-driven architecture (MDA) idea of transforming models on different abstraction levels, from highly abstract design-oriented views to an executable program, is a current trend in business process modeling. BDI agents provide a framework for both aspects by employing a planning from second principles approach, which uses a predefined library of plans and instantiates and adapts these plans. From this perspective, plans are design-time models for agent task execution and for Web Service composition. This paper presents a Rapid Prototyping framework for SOAs built around a Model-Driven Development methodology which we use for transforming highlevel specifications of an SOA into executable artefacts, both for Web Services (WSDL files) and for BDI agents. The framework was designed to handle a mix of new and existing services and provides facilities for simulating, logging, analysing and debugging. Our framework was validated on a real industrial electronic procurement scenario in the furniture manufacturing industry. Once input from business experts had been collected, creating the high-level PIM4SOA (Platform Independent Model for SOA) model, deriving the Web service description and incorporating existing Web services took less than a day for a person already familiar with the techniques and tools involved. We show that rapid prototyping of SOAs is possible without sacrificing the alignment of the prototype with high-level architectural constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.