dc.description.abstract | Recently, the concept “software as a service” has attracted the researchers’ attention
and adopted by the software development communities gradually. Multi-agents and Web
services are well-known software component technologies that are mature and can be lever-
aged to demonstrate the importance of reusability of software component in developing a
complex application system. However, how to locate a suitable service component becomes
a crucial issue in an open and distributed application environment. Statically matching
service in software development phase and dynamically matching service in software exe-
cution phase are approaches covered by this issue. To achieve such goal, we need a service
matching platform which deals with topics, including how to describe and register ser-
vices, how to represent requests, and how to efficiently match services with requests. This
research proposes a possibilistic Petri-nets (PPN) based service matchmaking mechanism
which leverages possibilistic reasoning and PPN formalism to handle the uncertainty fea-
ture caused by the inconsistency between requests and services when performing service
matchmaking. Additionally, a specification called PPN-ASDL (PPN-based Agent Service Description Language) is devised to visually represent the requests, services, the service
matchmaking between them, and what the matching results would be. The XML and On-
tology technologies are involved to develop structural language specification and to capture
domain information for ease of usage and helping the matching process by increasing the
precision of results. On the other hand, we propose an approach to incorporate WSDL
specification into the PPN-ASDL matchmaking model and integrate it with the standard
UDDI registry service with newly-defined tModels to extend the functionalities and perfor-
mance of UDDI registry service. Meanwhile, a new type of UDDI browser that is capable of
directly browse Web service information through meta-data of WSDL helps the developers
deal with Web services more efficiently and easily. Finally, we proposes a system called
SAM (Service-oriented Architecture for Multi-agents) to reach the wide adoption and rou-
tine use of agents, Web services, and semantic web technologies through the middle agent
(a PPN-based service matchmaker). Following features and contributions are summarized
as the conclusions of this research:
• elaborate a service matchmaking platform by leveraging possibilistic reasoning and
possibilistic Petri-nets.
• incorporate XML and Ontology technologies in developing structural service descrip-
tion language and capturing domain knowledge to cope with sematic match and partial
match.
• merge service matchmaking for multi-agents and Web services environments.
• integrate and extend UDDI standard with newly-devised searching and browsing func-
tionalities.
• propose a service-oriented architecture for multi-agents to integrate heterogenous ser-
vice resources. | en_US |