An Agent-based Architecture for Service Management

Services and agents represent two paradigms that are currentlyexploited to build complex applications. Each of themhas peculiar features that can grant different advantages,and their joint exploitation can make them compensate eachother’s lacks. However, a complete integration seems to benot feasible to achieve.In this paper, we propose an agent-based architecture tomanage different services; in particular, we focus on servicecomposition. This architecture relies on three different kindsof agents, whose cooperation aims at composing servicesto fulfill users’ requests. A concrete example in the field ofe-health is reported to give concreteness to our proposal.