Agents for e-Business Applications

Web services are increasingly utilized by organizations that want to improve responsiveness and efficiency. While they may be used in an isolated way, the need of integrating them as part of workflow processes is more and more felt. However the creation of applications composed of dynamically selected basic services entails facing two essential issues: how to efficiently discover Web services and how to allow and facilitate their composition. In this paper, we propose an agent-based framework representing an attempt of giving an answer to such problems. Its peculiar characteristic and strength is the integration of the agent technology with other key emerging technologies, that is semantic Web, Web service, rule engine and workflow technologies. The multiagent system, which constitutes the backbone of the framework, represents the “glue” that holds these pieces together and makes them perform properly. The framework has been experimented and evaluated in the realization of a simple, but realistic, prototype of an e-travelling system. The results, though still preliminary, are quite encouraging.