Autonomous Distributed Service System: Concept, Design and Implementation

Abstract

In both e-business and e-science, we often need to integrate services across distributed, heterogeneous, dynamic “virtual organizations” formed from the disparate resources within a single enterprise and/or from external resource sharing and service provider relationships. This integration is technically challenging because of the need to achieve various levels of quality of service (QoS) when running on top of different native platforms and under dynamic workload conditions. We present an Autonomous Distributed Service System Architecture that addresses these challenges. Building on concepts and technologies from the Semantic Web, Multi-Agent Systems, Grid and Web services communities, this architecture put together a proposition made to cope with heterogeneous and continuously changing needs of information processing, service provision and utilization in dynamically evolving environment to meet these requirements. Autonomous Distributed Services Architecture also define agents’ capabilities in terms of Web services Description Language (WSDL), so that agents can describe and advertise themselves in UDDI (Universal Description Discovery & Integration) as and when required. There is an inherent communication gap between software agents and other service oriented architectures (SOA) like Web services and Grids, due to different communication protocols, service descriptions, schema definitions and message structures they use. These issues are addressed in thesis where we have proposed a new way of communication and registration of Agent Services in Grid environment. xii Regarding the implementation of proposed architecture, both Grid and Web services are successfully invoked using Software Agents developed in JADE. In addition to this task, registering of a Web service in the Grid index service is also achieved successfully so that Web services could be accessed in Grid environment.