Putting Together Web Services and Compositional Software Agents

Web services are the newest trend in information technology, being considered the most used alternative for building distributed open systems. Although currently Web services involve a single client–server access, the market is demanding cooperative Web services to provide a global solution. Recently software agents appear as a good option that can cope with the control of Web services composition, obtaining an integral solution. This paper presents an approach to integrate Web services and software agent technologies. The basis of our approach is the use of the component technology for the development of adaptive software agents. Our compositional software agent performs automated software composition based on the flexibility provided by the component orientation, which makes possible to plug Web services into the agent functionality and compose them during the agent interaction.