Efficiently Distributing Interactions between Composed Information Agents

When information agents are organized to provide some composed functionality, their interactions can be formally represented as workflows. Traditionally, workflows are executed by centralized engines that invoke the necessary agents and collect results. If agents are clustered (e.g., based on geographic criteria), locally routing intermediary results between agents in the same cluster can be more efficient. This paper describes a mechanism that allows the execution of workflows in a distributed way. Intermediary results are routed directly from the producing service to the consuming one, minimizing the network traffic to the client. This approach is particularly useful if the client uses a mobile device with a slow or expensive network connection.