Service composition through agent-based coalition formation

Service-oriented architectures, such as Web services and Grid services, have been recognised as advantageous architectural styles for future enterprise and scientific applications. However, on top of already available middleware layers, many problems regarding the management of service compositions have been identified as open issues. This paper introduces the concept of an agent-based framework for dynamic and adaptive service composition. This approach consists of a multi-agent system which comprises software agents requesting and providing composite services based on semantically enriched Web services. The composition process is performed by software agents engaging in a coalition formation process to collectively provide composite services that meet complex user requests