| Web Services technology is an emerging paradigm in establishing a standard environment for legacy applications integration over the Internet. Using Web services and related technologies facilitate the implementation of a virtual enterprise across heterogeneous software platforms. However, Web services suffer from some shortcomings fulfilling requirements of setting up a reactive and autonomous collaboration among enterprises. The current technology of Web services registry, known as UDDI, is in its infancy stage.; The aim of this work is to integrate intelligent software agents and Web services in order to apply them to create a collaborative environment. We start with describing the concepts of virtual enterprise, Web services, and software agents as well as their requirements, problems, and benefits. To this extent, we identify the existing problems with Web services technology and discuss the feasibility of using software agents and their abilities to prevail those difficulties. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
