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Towards Service Coalitions: Coordinating the Commitments in a Workflow

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Multiagent System Technologies (MATES 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 3550))

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Abstract

Web services are functionalities that can be engaged over the Internet. A workflow is a set of Web services that are executed by carrying out specified control and data flows among these services to address some business needs. We believe that commitments among agents can be used to model a workflow and coordinate several self-interested parties to execute a workflow. This paper presents a methodology to infer commitments and causal relationships from a workflow by utilizing semantic descriptions of Web services. We provide an example scenario to show how commitments of a workflow can be inferred. In addition, we use the Petri net representation of a workflow to describe our algorithm. With this technology, agents (service requestors and providers) engaged in a workflow can negotiate with multiple agents to reach favorable agreements and then coordinate their behaviors through the commitment operations in the context of service-oriented environment, where one or more self-interested parties can provide services to one or more other parties.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & Engr., University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Jiangbo Dang & Michael N. Huhns

Authors
  1. Jiangbo Dang
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  2. Michael N. Huhns
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chair of Information Systems Management, University of Bayreuth, Universitätsstrasse 30, Germany

    Torsten Eymann

  2. Department for Artificial Intelligence, University of Würzburg, Am Hubland, 97074, Würzburg

    Franziska Klügl

  3. Distributed Systems and Information Systems, Computer Science Department, University of Hamburg, Vogt–Kölln–Str. 30, 22527, Hamburg, Germany

    Winfried Lamersdorf

  4. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123, Saarbruecken, Germany

    Matthias Klusch

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, 29208, Columbia, SC, USA

    Michael N. Huhns

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Dang, J., Huhns, M.N. (2005). Towards Service Coalitions: Coordinating the Commitments in a Workflow. In: Eymann, T., Klügl, F., Lamersdorf, W., Klusch, M., Huhns, M.N. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3550. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11550648_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11550648_6

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28740-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28741-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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