A framework for integrating web services and multi-agent systems

Web-service technologies are vitally important in integrating business applications with other applications for realizing service-oriented architecture. But there are two major challenges in this technology: (i) not effectively accounting semantics and non-functional attributes of service discovery request in service discovery and search process; (ii) high interaction between human and machine for meeting human needs. In this paper, an approach was used for solving the first problem that uses fuzzy logic in expressing service non-functional attributes. To solve the second problem, i.e. to decrease human-machine interaction and to increase machine-machine interaction on one hand and to increase the scalability of web service discovery approach on the other hand, the approach of integrating web technology with FIPA software agents technology was used. The proposed framework allows the interaction of web services and agent services by Broker. We describe how to analyze agent/web service discovery/publication request and linking them. Despite the content so DF registry and UDDI registry are inconsistent, but web service suggestion is possible for agent service discovery request by using ACL2SOAP and SOAP2ACL converter and vice versa.