Software Agent Negotiation for Service Composition

Service---oriented computing (SOC) is posing new challenges in the management of compositions of services that usually belong to different administrative domains. As such they cannot be provided by adopting a centralized approach, but more sophisticated computing methodologies are necessary. In this paper we propose to use software agent negotiation to address the problem of composing services in service---oriented environments, like the Grid. In particular, we propose to use software agents to represent service providers and service consumers, and a negotiation protocol to select the service providers that meet the requirements of service consumers on the provision of multiple interconnected services. The proposed protocol is thought as a flexibleprotocol to improve the possibility of reaching an agreement by allowing both service consumers and providers to exchange more proposals to accommodate the dynamic and changing nature of service---oriented environments.