Mobile Agents For Web Services Composition

Web service composition using workflow management technology, can provide cross-platform and language independent IT environment, which is also easy to reuse and adapts to change. All these features perform well in meeting with the requirement of agile manufactory. Nowadays, it becomes the hottest trend in information technology. After reviewing former research, we combine the solution of industry and academy, then propose a new method, which uses workflow file as the guide of web service composition and the mobile agent as the concrete engine. This method takes the advantages from industry, which is more feasible and can offer predictable performance. At the same time, since mobile agent is used as the engine of workflow instance, this solution can avoid centralizing enactment mechanisms and one-point failure, which are the disadvantages of industrial method. Compared with the dynamically composition of web service, which is the solution in academic world, this method is more feasible and efficient. We adopt a dynamic frame of agent, which can create new type of agent by configuring document. It makes the system convenient to adapt the new method of researcher. In this article, we discuss a possible path for gradually bridging this gap between the centralized mindset on current web service platforms and researchers' vision of distributed, dynamic web service composition.A demo system was implemented to realize most part of the solution, including the design of configure document, the dynamic Agent frame, and the transformation between SOAP and ACL. In the end, an example of supplying chain is introduced, which is built on this platform.