Agent Technology for Context-aware Execution of Semantic Web Services

This thesis was related to context-aware service execution in multi-agent environments. Its main objective was to define and implement reusable components and an OWL-S services execution agent. The main contributions of this thesis to the state of the art were:

• to introduce the use of context-awareness in the semantic web service execution process;
• an OWL-S extension to enable the grounding specification of agent-based service providers and
• a service execution model that covers all of the control constructs of the OWL-S language.

The OWL-S extension for enabling grounding specification of agent-based service providers was made because originally OWL-S implied the use of Web Services only, and did not allow the use of service provider agents. A set of reusable software components for the execution of services was created, from which the architecture for a semantic web services context-aware execution agent was defined. Using the defined architecture and the created software components, a context-aware service execution agent was developed.

The developed agent executes services through the decomposition of their OWL-S descriptions and the invocation of the corresponding atomic service providers. The agent also uses context-aware capabilities to optimize the execution process.

The implementation of the agent was done through the integration and/or the extension of the following software tools: JADE, OWL-S API and XSP. The implemented agent was tested on a concrete book e-commerce scenario.

M.Sc. Thesis Advisor: Professor Luís Miguel Botelho

Conclusion: January 2006