Interoperability Support for E-Business Applications through Standards, Services, and Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract

Intelligent agents can be regarded as autonomous, problem-solving computational entities with social abilities that are capable of effective pro-active behavior in open and dynamic environments. If the term entity is replaced by service the substantial overlap in interests between both communities can easily be imagined. Nevertheless, right now the main research focus of each community seems to be different. The service-oriented computing community concentrates mainly on developing service engineering methodologies. Active topics in the multi-agent systems community are collaboration, self-organization, adaptability, flexibility, proactiveness, and interoperability. The overlap between those two communities and the fact that they concentrate on different research topics can definitely be seen as a huge chance since it means that each community may be able to benefit from the research efforts of the other.