User-Centric Service Brokerage in a Personal Multi-Agent Environment

Service brokerage is a central issue in multiagent 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 multi-agent 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.