Integrating and orchestrating services upon an agent coordination infrastructure

Abstract

The adoption of Multi-Agent Systems for system engineering often requires legacy and human-oriented services to be integrated into agent societies. In turn, this aspect impacts the engineering of interactive systems that involve the cooperation of agents and (human) actors - such as, for instance, workflow management systems. In this context, the coordination model adopted by the multi-agent system infrastructure strongly conditions the design, development and exploitation of available services. In this work we address the issue of composing and coordinating services upon a suitable agent coordination infrastructure. First, we discuss how the infrastructure's metaphors and coordination artifacts can be exploited to support service integration, and illustrate the envisioned scenarios making specific reference to the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure. Then, we discuss in detail the issue of the engineering of (possibly heterogeneous and legacy) services: the case study of e-mail, file transfer, and web browsing services is finally presented. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.