Today's service-oriented systems realize many ideas from the research conducted a decade or so ago in multiagent systems. Because these two fields are so deeply connected, further advances in multiagent systems could feed into tomorrow's successful service-oriented computing approaches.This article describes a 15-year roadmap for service-oriented multiagent system research. W e've already seen service-oriented computing (SOC) take hold in cross-enterprise business settings, such as the use of FedEx and UPS shipping services in e-commerce transactions; the aggregation of hotel, car rental, and airline services by Expedia and Orbitz; or bookrating services for libraries, consumers, and bookstores. Given the widespread interest in and deployment of Web services and service-oriented architectures that are occurring in industry, the scope of SOC in business settings will expand substantially. However, the emphasis has been on the execution of individual services and not on the more important problems of how services are selected and how they can collaborate to provide higher levels of functionality. Fortunately, four major trends in computing are addressing this problem:• Online ontologies are enabling meaning and understanding, arguably the last frontier for computing, to be captured and shared in more refined ways -via the Semantic Web initiative, for example, with the development of languages and representations for marking up heterogeneous content. In an alternative approach, shared representations are emerging from the works of (millions of) independent content developers. These ontologies will form models for numerous real-world entities and systems, as well as for the meanings of documents and content. • The widespread availability of many different types of sensors and effectors (including actuators and robotic devices) will enable online entities to not only become aware of the physical world, but also to manipulate, change, and control it.These trends are the new enablers that will drive SOC and multiagent system (MAS) research in the next decade and beyond. They portend an era in which complex systems will be modeled and simulated not just to understand them, but also to form predictions and interpretations that guide the monitoring and managing of them. SOC brings to the fore additional considerations, such as the necessity of modeling autonomous and heterogeneous components in uncertain and dynamic environments. Such components must be autonomously reactive and proactive yet able to interact flexibly with other components and environments. As a result, they're best thought of as agents, which collectively form MASs. Additionally, the key MAS concepts are reflected directly in those of SOC:•
Multiagent SystemsThe history of MASs mirrors the history of computing in general. In the 1980s, distributed computing over LANs and advances in expert systems motivated the initial interest in distributed agents. Because the resulting systems functioned in single organizations, cooperation was the main focus. In the...