Agent-based support for service composition

Abstract

The complexity of Web services and software agents engineering calls for an approach that aims first, at hiding this complexity and second, at supporting designers in their design and development work. This chapter presents such an approach, which proposes three aspects related to Web services and software agents engineering: intrinsic, organizational/functional, and behavioral. Once the Web services and software agents are engineered, the user in collaboration, with some of the software agents, composes Web services into composite services. The selection of Web services to participate in a composite service is based on two criteria: the execution cost of a Web service and the location of the computing hosts on which the Web service is performed.