Dynamic Service Matchmaking Among Agents in Open Information Environments

Abstract

The amount of services and deployed software agents in the most famous o spring of the Internet, the World Wide Web, is exponentially increasing. In addition, the Internet is an open environment, where information sources, communication links and agents themselves may appear and disappear unpredictably. Thus, an e ective, automated search and selection of relevant services or agents is essential for human users and agents as well. We distinguish three general agent categories in the Cyberspace, service providers, service requester, and middle agents. Service providers provide some type of service, such as nding information, or performing some particular domain speci c problem solving. Requester agents need provider agents to perform some service for them. Agents that help locate others are called middle agents[2]. Matchmaking is the process of nding an appropriate provider for a requester through a middle agent, and has the following general form: (1) Provider agents advertise their capabilities to middle agents, (2) middle agents store these advertisements, (3) a requester asks some middle agent whether it knows of providers with desired capabilities, and (4) the middle agent matches the request against the stored advertisements and returns the result, a subset of the stored advertisements. While this process at rst glance seems very simple, it is complicated by the fact that not only local information sources but even providers and requesters in the Cyberspace are usually heterogeneous and incapable of understanding each other.