Stanisław Ambroszkiewicz, Tomasz Nowak

Agentspace as a Middleware
for Service Integration

931

Abstract

Agentspace is an emerging environment resulting from process automation in the Internet and the Web. It is supposed that autonomous software (mobile) agents provide the automation. The agents realize goals delegated to them by their human masters. Interoperability is crucial to assure meaningful interaction, communication and cooperation between heterogeneous agents and heterogeneous services. In order to realize the goals, the agents must create, manage and reconfigure complex workflows. Usually, a workflow integrates a number of heterogeneous services. Our research aims at extracting a minimum that is necessary and sufficient for providing transparency between users and services, i.e. for joining applications as services to agentspace on the one hand and for using and integrating them by heterogeneous agents (on behalf of their users) on the other hand. For this very purpose we introduce a new concept of agent architecture as well as the new agent mobility form called soul migration.

Keywords : service integration, agent organization, workflow management, mobile software agent, middleware.