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Hybrid Agent Web Service Engineering: A Case Study in Financial Application Domain

Hybrid Agent Web Service Engineering: A Case Study in Financial Application Domain
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Author(s): Sujan Pradhan (La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne, Australia)and Hongen Lu (La Trobe University, Bundoora, Melbourne, Australia)
Copyright: 2006
Pages: 5
Source title: Emerging Trends and Challenges in Information Technology Management
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-019-6.ch207
ISBN13: 9781616921286
EISBN13: 9781466665361

Abstract

The adaptation of Web Service (WS) by the financial services industry is inherently becoming quite common in the new architectural paradigm- Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, such proliferation has had its share of limitations in building new loosely coupled, intelligent and dynamic applications. This paper proposes to extend these limitations by introducing a traditional concept of software agents which are wrapped around by WS. These agents capture the following essences which the WS lacks- autonomous behavior, ability to build up intelligence over time, and able to hold conversation-like transactions. These multilingual agents are hybrids, which profoundly fill in the few gaps of several WS shortcomings. In order to build such hybridity the following are proposed: during WS invocations SOAP is used as the Agent Communication Language (ACL) to communicate between agents (or between an agent and a WS) since it is readily available over HTTP; and during local (or distributed) access of resources some other traditional established form of ACL is used. By incorporating such hybrid characteristics new web applications are now able to utilize and capture the versatility of WS while maintaining dynamism, intelligence, transactional semantics and autonomous behavior within the application. Furthermore, the integration of these agents help construct a well defined architecture, as they are built from proven formal engineering methodologies and standards, which are not yet available to WS. A model in financial services application domain is used to exemplify the above.

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