A Possibilistic Petri-Nets Based Service Matchmaker for Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to devise a service-oriented architecture for multi-agents system (called SAM), to reach a wide adoption and routine use of agents, web services, and semantic web technologies. In order to better integrate agents, web applications and information sources in an open and distributed environment such as the Internet, a service matchmaker called middle agent is responsible for registering and spotting services in SAM. In the making of the service matchmaker there are four components involved: (1) a possibilistic Petri-nets (PPN) based service matchmaking mechanism for discovering services, (2) a service description language based on PPN for describing agent services and web services, (3) a set of ontologies for facilitating the semantic matchmaking, and (4) newly-defined extension mechanisms for bridging the linkage between web service standards and the service matchmaker through a translator.