An Agent Framework Integrated with Web Services for Grid Computing

In order to build an open and inter-operable Multi-Agent System in Grid environment, we considered integrating Agents technologies with Web Services. We focused on agent communication layer by encoding performatives and message contents in SOAP. Through an agent communication language and an abstract communication model, we defined a generic API to communications, which supported multiple protocols, such as the XML protocol. We also focused on all technical aspects of creating, deploying, and publishing agents as Web Services and hence presented the notion of Agent Services. We made use of the WSDL language and XML Schemas respectively to describe agent's behavior and the performatives they support. Using this approach, an agent in our framework could be published in the UDDI registry, discovered and reused like any other standard Web Service.