AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH FOR HYBRID MULTI-CLOUD APPLICATIONS

2007

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) is a paradigm for building new software applications from existing loosely-coupled services. During service composition, services available to play different roles in a composition may have variations in their businesslevel protocols. These protocols may involve communication between two services in a point-topoint relationship, or communication among more than two services. Furthermore, as the business processes change, those protocols need to be modified to reflect the changes. In this paper, we propose a method to describe protocols between roles that services will play in the composition by specifying the temporal constraints. An automated aggregation of those protocols is then carried out to produce rolecentric views. Protocol compatibility of available services can then be checked against these views. We will show how our approach supports the incremental specification of protocols and the flexibility of changing protocols.

Service Oriented Computing and Applications, 2015

The evolution of Web and service technologies has led to a wide landscape of standards and protocols for interaction between loosely coupled software components. Examples range from Web applications, mashups, apps, and mobile devices to enterprise-grade services. Cloud computing is the industrialization of service provision and delivery, where Web and enterprise services are converging on a technological level. The article discusses this technological landscape and, in particular, current trends with respect to cloud computing. The survey focuses on the communication aspect of interaction by reviewing languages, protocols, and architectures that drive today’s standards and software implementations applicable in clouds. Technological advances will affect both client side and service side. There is a trend toward multiplexing, multihoming, and encryption in upcoming transport mechanisms, especially for architectures, where a client simultaneously sends a large number of requests to some service. Furthermore, there are emerging client-to-client communication capabilities in Web clients that could establish a foundation for upcoming Web-based messaging architectures.

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 2020

Cloud computing is readily being adopted by enterprises due to its following benefits: ability to provide better service to customers, improved flexibility, lower barrier to entry for an enterprise, lower maintenance cost on IT service, availability etc. However, the interaction between cloud service provider and customer is not well-defined yet. Understanding of the service offered while approaching cloud computing paradigm and also understanding of the required actions during the period of receiving a cloud service e.g. provision of new resources, scaling up/down, billing, etc. remains a concern for the enterprises. This paper proposes a segregated interaction model to manage the receiving of a cloud service in a hierarchical way.

ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, 2007

Multi-Agent-Systems or MAS represent a powerful distributed computing model, enabling agents to cooperate and complete with each other and to exchange both semantic content and a semantic context to more automatically and accurately interpret the content. Many types of individual agent and MAS models have been proposed since the mid-1980s, but the majority of these have led to single developer homogeneous MAS systems. For over a decade, the FIPA standards activity has worked to produce public MAS specifications, acting as a key enabler to support interoperability, open service interaction, and to support heterogeneous development. The main characteristics of the FIPA model for MAS and an analysis of design, design choices and features of the model is presented. In addition, a comparison of the FIPA model for system interoperability versus those of other standards bodies is presented, along with a discussion of the current status of FIPA and future directions.

Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2006

In the area of Web services and service-oriented architectures, business protocols are rapidly gaining importance and mindshare as a necessary part of Web service descriptions. Their immediate benefit is that they provide developers with information on how to write clients that can correctly interact with a given service or with a set of services. In addition, once protocols become an accepted practice and service descriptions become endowed with protocol information, the middleware can be significantly extended to better support service development, binding, and execution in a number of ways, considerably simplifying the whole service lifecycle. This paper discusses the different ways in which the middleware can leverage protocol descriptions, and focuses in particular on the notions of protocol compatibility, equivalence, and replaceability. They characterize whether two services can interact based on their protocol definition, whether a service can replace another in general or when interacting with specific clients, and which are the set of possible interactions among two services.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

As businesses transit towards cloud and service oriented economy, agents are employed to efficiently negotiate service level agreements (SLAs) on services procured automatically to match changes in demand. This 'pay-as-you-go' trading model affords flexibility with reliability, but requires customized and seamless interactions enabled by negotiation protocols that best serve the market domain. To this end, we present a domain-independent framework based on a protocol development lifecycle, comprising four distinct phases namely modeling, verification, rulebased implementation and generic execution.

The Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming, 2007

This work faces the problem of automatic selection and composition of web services, discussing the advantages that derive from the inclusion, in a web service declarative description, of the high-level communication protocol, that is used by the service for interacting with its partners, allowing a rational inspection of it. The approach we propose is set in the Semantic Web field of research and inherits from research in the field of multi-agent systems. Web services are viewed as software agents, communicating by predefined sharable interaction protocols. A logic programming framework based on modal logic is proposed, where the protocolbased interactions of web services are formalized and the use of reasoning about actions and change techniques (planning) for performing the tasks of selection and composition of web services in a way that is personalized w.r.t. the user request is enabled. We claim that applying reasoning techniques on a declarative specification of the service interactions allows to gain flexibility in fulfilling the user preference in the context of a web service matchmaking process.

2006

This paper presents a new approach which addresses the issue of inconsistent message exchange during agent interactions. We advocate that in agent-based service-oriented computing systems, only agents should be in charge of executing interactions. We also require that the architecture of an agent be clearly separated in two distinct parts, a public and a private parts. The public part contains the interaction model, while any other data and process the agent needs belong to the private part. Our solution consists of automatically constructing the interaction model. It is based on a unification of the actions, required of an agent playing a role in a generic protocol, and the functionalities abstracted from the BPEL4WS model of this agent. We present the algorithms to perform this unification as well as the abstract models they manipulate.

Packt Publishing Ltd

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

In the area of Web services and service-oriented architectures, business protocols are rapidly gaining importance and mindshare as a necessary part of Web service descriptions. Their immediate benefit is that they provide developers with information on how to write clients that can correctly interact with a given service or with a set of services. In addition, once protocols become an accepted practice and service descriptions become endowed with protocol information, the middleware can be significantly extended to better support service development, binding, and execution in a number of ways, considerably simplifying the whole service life-cycle. This paper discusses the different ways in which the middleware can leverage protocol descriptions, and focuses in particular on the notions of protocol compatibility, equivalence, and replace-ability. They characterise whether two services can interact based on their protocol definition, whether a service can replace another in general or when interacting with specific clients, and which are the set of possible interactions among two services.

2006

This paper explores the challenges of constructing an architecture for inter-organisational collaborative interactions based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services choreographies and software agents. We present an approach to harmonisation of the “global” or neutral definition of business collaborations, with partner-specific implementations, which can differ in terms of platform, environment, implementation technology, etc. By introducing the concept of pluggable business service handlers into our architecture we draw on the work carried out by ebXML initiative, business services interfaces, in particular. Due to increasing need for better management of collaborative interactions, Virtual Organisations (VO) become an important tool for creation and maintenance of federated trust domains among the collaboration partners. We look into the software agents abilities to serve as the background support mechanism for the automation and management of the Virtual Organisations...

2013

2006

There is great promise in the idea of having agent or web services available on the internet, that can be flexibly composed to achieve more complex services, which can themselves then also be used as components in other contexts. However it is challenging to realise this idea, without essentially programming the composition using some process language such as BPEL4WS or OWLS process descriptions. This paper presents a mechanism for specifying the external interface to composite and component services, and then deriving an appropriate internal model to realise a functioning composition. We present a conversation specification language for defining interaction protocols and investigate the issue of synchronous and asynchronous communication between the composite service and the component services. The algorithm presented computes a valid orchestration of components, given the interface specification of the desired composite service, interface specifications of available components, and some mapping rules between parameters to deal with ontological issues.