Agent-based Workflow Configuration and Management of On-line Services

With the emergence of distributed component-based technologies, information services have become extremely modular and autonomous. This autonomy has allowed organizations within one enterprise to develop component-based solutions that are independent and perform tasks relevant to their domain-specific functionality. However, enterprise-level operations typically require the workflow composition of these independent services to accomplish corporate-wide goals. In traditional development environments, enterprises have taken a “top-down” approach where the workflow was conceptualized and supporting low-level services have been created. This solution neglects the robustness and reuse associated with current distributed component-based technologies. In this work, there is a “bottom-up” approach where existing component-based services can be composed to conform to a user-specified workflow. This paper presents an agent architecture that acts as an adaptive middleware-layer between existing components. This architecture accepts workflow specifications in the Unified Modeling Language as input to this middleware-layer. Furthermore, we detail the implementation and results of this architecture that configures and manages a set of Java-based components.