User-centric service brokerage in a personal multi-agent environment

Service brokerage is a central issue in mult-agent systems. Existing approaches often address the brokering among agents in terms of cooperative problem solving. Our work, however, deals with brokering the services offered to users in a multiagent system. The user should be able to choose the desired services and assign concrete tasks to the service-offering agents utilizing those services. To this end, we based our work on the "semantic Web services " approach. After pointing out the problems the users and agents are faced with, we discuss some related approaches and introduce the results of our work: a broker agent as a user service of the agent platform.