Coordination is the process of managing the possible interactions between activities and processes; a mechanism to handle such interactions is known as a coordination regime. A successful coordination regime will prevent negative interactions occurring (e.g., by preventing two processes from simultaneously accessing a non-shareable resource), and wherever possible will facilitate positive interactions (e.g., by ensuring that activities are not needlessly duplicated). We start from the premise that effective coordination mechanisms require the sharing of knowledge about activities, resources and their properties, and hence, that in a heterogeneous environment, an ontological approach to coordination is appropriate. After surveying recent work on dynamic coordination, we describe an ontology for coordination that we have developed with the goal of coordinating semantic web processes. We then present a implementation of our ideas, which serves as a proof of concept for how this ontology can be used for dynamic coordination. We conclude with a summary of the presented work, illustrate its relation to the Semantic Web, and provide insights into future extensions.
In a survey on the theory and practice of agent system deployment, conducted by the AgentLink workgroup on networked agents, it was found that there are an increasing number of initiatives for the migration of agents research towards new Internet technologies such as the semantic web, Grid, and Web services. In fact, Grid computing and multi-agent systems research have similar objectives. They both aim to achieve “large-scale open distributed systems, capable of being able to effectively and dynamically deploy and redeploy computational (and other) resources as required, to solve computationally complex problems” [Foster and Kesselman 2003]. On the one hand, service-oriented Grid architectures need to support dynamic cooperation, negotiation, and adaptive interactions between Web services controlling Grid resources for efficient resource and task allocation and execution. On the other hand, the Grid can facilitate agent communication, life-cycle management, and access to resources for agents. Although the relevance of Grid for agent research and vice versa has been identified in several forums, actual collaborative applications are still in their infancy. In this article, we discuss our recent work on deploying multi-agent negotiation techniques to facilitate dynamic negotiation for Grid resources as a step closer to an adaptive and autonomous Grid. In particular, we describe a Web service development of the Contract Net Protocol for negotiation between insurance companies and repair companies. We evaluate our approach to show the added value of negotiable interactions between Web services as opposed to inflexible single-shot interactions that are currently the state of the art.
Although web services aim to bring about seamless and effective communication in a wide variety of Internet applications, the interactions between them are currently limited to simple request-response exchanges. However, in the longer term we believe this is unsustainable. In particular, we believe that more complex protocols for web service conversations are necessary if the participants are to tailor their needs and offers to the prevailing context and they are to coordinate multiple services in open and realistic environments. To this end, this paper combines and extends two recent web service languages, WS-Conversation Language (WSCL) and WS-Agreement, in order to obtain a method for engineering protocols of sufficient expressiveness for the next generation of flexible and autonomous services. Specifically, we propose that the protocols include speech-acts as the individual messages and we show how to model such speech-acts as WS-Agreement schemas, which can, in turn, be imported into the specification of the protocols in WSCL. To demonstrate our approach, we express a standard contracting protocol in the extended WSCL/ WS-Agreement languages. Furthermore, we use statechart notation as a visual counterpart to help developers write clients that flexibly interact with a service and to help users to better understand how to interact with a service. Finally, we show that the translation between statecharts and WSCL/WS-Agreement protocols is straightforward. r
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