Conceptual Integration of Agents with WSDL and RESTful Web Services

Agent communication has been standardized by FIPA in order to ensure interoperability of agent platforms. In practice only few deployed agent applications exist and agent technology remains a niche technology that runs its own isolated technology stack. In order to facilitate the integration of agents with well-established and used technologies the connection of agents with web services plays an important role. This problem has traditionally been tackled by creating translation elements that accept FIPA or web service requests as input and produce the opposite as output. In this paper we will show how a generic integration of web services can be achieved for agents that follow our active components approach. Active components allow encapsulating agent behavior in black box components that may act as service providers and consumers with explicit service interfaces. Thus, the integration approach will directly make use of these services. Concretely, the presented approach aims at answering two important questions. First, how can specific functionality of an existing agent system be made available to non-agent systems and users? Second, how can an agent system seamlessly integrate existing non agent functionality? The first aspect relates to the task of service publication while the latter refers to external service invocation. In this paper a generic conceptual approach for both aspects will be presented and it will be further shown how a specific integration with both WSDL and RESTful web services can be achieved. Example applications will be used to illustrate the approach in more details.