Web service based model for inter-agent communication in multi-agent systems: A case study

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a widely used model for enterprise application integration, mainly due to the presence of accepted standards and tools required to implement web services. While the service oriented architecture provides an elegant model for interoperability, it does not define a computational model for building the endpoints of complex distributed services it exposes in a typical enterprise application. On the other hand, software agent technology provides powerful models such as the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model that allows developers to build distributed systems with enhanced reasoning capabilities. We propose a web services based communication model for inter-agent communication allowing heterogeneous agents in a multi agent system to freely collaborate. We specifically focus on goal and beliefset sharing in BDI based agents. By providing a web services based interface, we allow agents as well as non-agent based services in a distributed system to yield the benefits of agent technology. Applicability of this proposition is demonstrated by designing and implementing a prototype multi-agent system for flood forecasting.