A Tuple-Space-Based Coordination Architecture for Test Agents in the MAST Framework

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming the mainstream of distributed system integration. Trustworthiness is critical for cross-domain service interaction, and testing is necessary to build the trust among the different parties involved in SOA. MAST, a multi-agent-based service testing framework, was proposed for testing service-based applications in our previous work. This paper further explores the agent coordination issues in the MAST framework to address the challenge of effective agent communication and interaction. A hybrid coordination architecture is presented which combines data-driven and control-driven models based on the reactive tuple space technique. Different tuple spaces are introduced to facilitate data sharing and asynchronous coordination among test agents. A subscription mechanism is introduced to associate programmable reactions to the events occurred and state changes on the tuple space. The mobile agent technique is also introduced to implement the test agents, which are created on line carrying the tasks, and migrate to the host computers to execute various tasks. A prototype system is designed and implemented to illustrate the proposed approach