Composing Web Services Using a Multi-Agent Framework

Different web services can be composed to perform increasingly complex tasks (e.g., making an on-line payment). However, existing approaches compose web services with hard-coded control and data flows. To proactively and autonomously compose web services, developers can develop agents. However, the development of agents for service composition is complex, due to the reasons that: 1) developers may not have the knowledge from various domains to identify the necessary tasks to carry out the required web services; and 2) a deep understanding of the agent specific code is required in order to implement agents. To alleviate the required efforts to develop agents, we propose an approach to separate the development of agent specific code from the business logic code in the service composition. More specifically, we provide an easy-to-understand syntax that abstracts agent specific code and automatically generates executable agent code. Our experimental results show that our approach can accurately identify tasks for service composition with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.88. Our experiments also demonstrate that our approach can correctly generate agent code from seven agent specifications. Finally, our user studies reveal that developers are satisfied with our approach to develop agents for service composition.