Incorporating Agent Behavior into Web Services

Current e-commerce systems require substantial human intervention in almost all phases of a business transaction. Software agent technology can be used to alleviate the problem and try to automate the business process as much as possible. This paper intends to combine the autonomous behavior of software agents and the interoperability of Web Services across heterogeneous and self-interested environments through agent behaviors The agent behaviors will not only describe operations and messages, but also valid invocation sequences of operations. New services can be composed flexibly and dynamically to utilize the best options available through public registries like UDDI. The paper provides algorithms to verify the validity of composed services.