JAAF-S: A Framework to Implement Autonomic Agents Able to Deal with Web Services

Due to the widespread interest and deployment of web services and service-oriented architectures in industry, it is necessary to develop systems able to, at run-time, discover, reason and select services. Considering that agents present properties like reasoning, autonomy, pro-activity and self-adaptation, the multi-agent system is a paradigm that fits these concerns. Agents can be used to autonomously and proactively discover services, decide about the most appropriate service and adapt themselves if they face a problem while using the selected service. In this paper we focus on a framework (Java self-Adaptive Agent Framework for Service – JAAF-S) to implement self-adaptive agents able to adapt themselves while searching and using web services. The framework also provides support to three main agent-related properties: autonomy, pro-activity and reasoning. JAAF-S extends the JADE framework that already gives support to autonomy and pro-active agents, provides reasoning methods based on rules, cases and genetic algorithms as well as mechanisms to discover and select web services.