Agent-based service coordination for the grid

Agents are active autonomous entities that interact with one another to achieve their objectives. This paper addresses how these active agents are a natural fit to consume the passive service oriented architecture which is found in Internet and grid systems, in order to compose, coordinate and execute e-science experiments. A framework is introduced which allows an e-science experiment to be described as a group of e-systems. The notion of a coordination template is introduced which describes the interactions between the agents, these templates do not have to be completely specified before execution and the framework allows agents to synthesize variants of this coordination from the template at run-time. The framework and template concept are applied to a live grid scenario, taken from the UK e-science project AstroGrid.