Dynamic conversations between agents with the PRACTIONIST Framework

In a world where business relationships involve automated collaboration between software systems acting as representatives of business organizations, agent-oriented computing provides useful theories and abstractions to support the development of such systems. We believe that the ability of agents to dynamically interact among one another plays a central role when developing real, flexible, and adaptive business-oriented applications. Therefore in our PRACTIONIST framework we defined a component that enable agents to dynamically participate in conversations with other agents, without being specifically programmed for that. In designing such a support, we reused and extended the Web Service Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL) to describe agent interaction protocols (both standard and nonstandard) in XML. Finally we developed some applications that intensively exploit such a support for dynamic conversations, as discussed at the end of this paper.