Toward the Synthesis of Web Services and Agent Behaviors

Today’s software systems are becoming more net-centric, distributed, and heterogeneous. Hardware, software and networking technology will combine in a milieu in which they become ubiquitous and inseparable. The acceleration of technology and time-to-market pressures make it increasingly difficult to produce software. In order to achieve the promise of the information age, software developers will require new abstractions that will allow them to manage the overwhelming complexity of this digital landscape. This short position paper describes a novel technique that will imbue agent software with dynamically configured capabilities. These capabilities, described with DAML-S, can represent atomic or orchestrated Web Services. The DAML-S specification will be transformed into an executable program written in a composition language named Piccola. When executed, the composite service will be available as a semantically described behavior within a FIPA compliant agent. The proposed architecture is designed for scalability, from mobile PDA devices with wireless connectivity to resource-rich server class systems.