Title: A development framework for component-based agent-oriented business services

Authors: Tai Nguyen, Manuel Kolp, Loris Penserini

Addresses: IAG-Louvain School of Management/ISYS, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Place des Doyens, 1, B-1348-Louvain la Neuve, Belgium. ' IAG-Louvain School of Management/ISYS, Universite Catholique de Louvain, Place des Doyens, 1, B-1348-Louvain la Neuve, Belgium. ' Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Intelligent Systems Group, Padualaan 14, De Uithof – 3584CH Utrecht, The Netherlands

Abstract: Nowadays, modern applications tend to be open and dynamic since they evolve in a changing organisational and operational environment where components can be added, modified, or removed at any time. Together, service-oriented computing and Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) represent dynamic and evolving structures which can change at run-time to benefit from the capabilities of new system entities or replace obsolete ones. They are particularly useful to define business services that refer to specific electronic business interactions. In this paper, we propose a business service development framework composed of three phases: modelling, design and specification. The modelling phase models two levels of a business service: the services of a business service and the agents of each service. The design phase details a business service with three models: component, structural and interaction. In the interaction model, which expresses the exchange or the communication between services or agents of a business service, there are three levels to model: the component (between services), the agent (between agents) and the message (the structure and ontology of messages). Finally, the specification phase presents information acquired from the modelling and design phases in a machine-readable language. Using the support toolkit, we developed a Multi-criteria Data Integration case study to illustrate the framework application.

Keywords: component-based services; agent-oriented software; business services; development framework; service-oriented computing; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; modelling; data integration.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOSE.2009.023642

International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, 2009 Vol.3 No.2/3, pp.328 - 367

Published online: 04 Mar 2009 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article