An Integration Framework For MAS And Web Service

After entering information age, relations among enterprises evolved from pure competitive to competitive but cooperative. Enterprises must integrate internal information system with their external partners. Agent technology provides a methodology for this kind of integration; it makes the reengineered information system self-adaptive, open and smart. Also, web service has become the general tool and actual standard for enterprise application integration for its standard and self-description. How to integrate MAS with web service became a hot research point.This paper proposed a novel software evolution methodology CRUTCH that can rapidly integrate partners'web services into internal agentified legacy system running. CRUTCH achieves this goal in two ways. On one hand, CRUTCH provides an architecture view that extends the standard FIPA's agent platform with a web service finder agent named WSFinder; on the other hand, CRUTCH developed a package and a XML schema of web service find criteria, providing a configurable way for WSAgent( agents who invoke external web service) development.CRUTCH Framework has defined the total architecture, every part's responsibility, class and object's interaction and control flow for web service and multi agent system's integration. Using CRUTCH, enterprises can abbreviate developing process and alleviate the developer's pain, making the enterprise qualified for the competitive and cooperative business environment rapidly.