Agent approach for service discovery and utilization

There is an extensive set of published and usable services on the Internet. Human based approaches to discover and utilize these services is not only time consuming, but also requires continuous user interaction. This paper describes an agent approach for service discovery and utilization (AASDU), which focuses on using light weight autonomous agents built into a multi-agent referral community, and Web service standards (namely UDDI, SOAP, WSDL and XML). The AASDU approach proposes to use agents that interact with end users by accepting their queries to discover services, and efficiently manage service invocation. AASDU uses intrinsic multi-agent properties to allow agents to communicate and cooperate with one another. Each agent conforms to a communication protocol that allows it to send and receive messages from another agent, without needing to know the address of the receiving agent. There is a need for effective and efficient communication among components in a multi-disciplinary, cross-organizational architecture. This has resulted in a proliferation of communication building blocks, or middleware, for distributed scientific computing. The most recent, and quite network-based services, referred to as Web services. This paper also discusses the interoperability that can be achieved between software components through the use of Web service standards and protocols in the context of AASDU.