Intelligent agent communication and collaboration for web services management

The increasing domain of service-oriented computing (SOC) and the continued growth of web services towards globalization create a significant need for the discovery of the most relevant web services to a business process. As services are abundant, yet scattered it is unreasonable and impractical to expect an employee to handle the thousands of management tasks desired and/or required on a continual basis. An agent federation might be the best solution for handling the addition of new business processes in a way that would seamlessly integrate the rationality of a human and the speed of a computer. This work introduces an architecture for the communication and collaboration of intelligent agents to enable businesses to share web services and adjust their systems on the fly. Furthermore, interaction patterns are introduced that define how agents implement this collaborative architecture for the benefit of their human counterparts.