The latest trend in system interoperability is the emerging concept of web services. Web services promote the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to represent services (Web Service Description Language (WSDL)), their locations and interactions (Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)). Using the web services paradigm with the Internet as a medium has the potential of universal system interoperability and functional reuse. Workflow Automation through Agent-Based Reflective Processes or WARP is the initial work that has the same goals in mind. WARP uses reflection and tuple-space communication to coordinate a workflow of componentbased services. The goal is toward the automatic configuration and management of low-level services (component-based). This work has the most potential with respect to business-to-business interaction (B2B). In this paper, we discuss our findings in the development of WARP and briefly discuss how these findings have relevance to future use of web services for business interactions.

Agents seeking to discover and compose needed Web services may face knowledge sharing interoperability problems due to differing ontologies. In practice, agents may not have a global consensus ontology that will facilitate knowledge sharing and integration of required services. We investigate a method for agents to develop local consensus ontologies to aid in the communication within a multi-agent system of business-tobusiness (B2B) agents. We compare variations of syntactic and semantic similarity matching to form local consensus ontologies with and without the use of a lexical database.

Abstract. With the sophistication and maturity of distributed component-based services and semantic web services, the idea of specification-driven service composition is becoming a reality. With relevance to this work is the workflow composition of services as they span multiple, distributed web-accessible locations. Given the dynamic nature of this domain, the autonomy and adaptation of software agents represent a possible solution for the composition and enactment of cross-organizational services. In this work, we address several aspects of such a domain. We detail design aspects of an architecture that would support this evolvable service-based workflow composition. We discuss the internal coordination and control aspects of such an architecture. A further overarching concern is the alignment of agent developmental processes with current industry standard software engineering processes.

Abstract. The autonomy and adaptation of software agents are valuable in environments that regularly change. The Internet presents such an environment, particularly with the addition of semantic web services. The connotation of distributed web services being offered across the Internet has researchers and industry personnel anticipating the seamless ability to automatically generate high-level composite services. Agents can play a measurable role in the workflow composition or “orchestration ” of these distributed services as they span multiple, distributed web-accessible locations. Though many studies have examined agent communication languages and coordination protocols based on their flexibility or completeness of information exchange, few investigations have empirical methods for evaluating the efficiency of one protocol over another. In this paper, we present several workflow-based agent coordination protocols consistent with third-party control approaches and peer-to-peer (P2P) approaches. We show the results of our experiments that evaluate these protocols in such a way that the correct approach can be determined based on specific operational conditions. These investigations are valid in the domain where agents coordinate to manage the workflow composition of distributed services. Keywords. Agent architectures, Workflow, Coordination, Linda, E-Services