An Agent Middleware for Supporting Ecosystems of Heterogeneous Web Services

The integration of a Multi-agent technology with a service oriented architecture provides a convenient way to build smarter applications that satisfy the demand of the current ubiquitous web systems. This paper provides a software tool to develop ubiquitous applications adopting the philosophy of agents and services as data sources. ADELE (Agent Dynamic EvoLutionary at runtime) is a middleware that allows developers to create reactive agents with the capability to evolve through the injection of external behaviors at runtime. An ADELE external behavior is a software component that allows agents to accomplish their goals. To facilitate the programming of these behaviors, agents can obtain the information consuming local and public web services (WSs) previously published on different services ecosystems. This paper shows how a Multi-agent System can consume heterogeneous WSs to satisfy the agent goals using a normative model. We have created three add-ons compatible with SOAP, RESTful, and Doha (Dynamic Open Home-Automation) WS model. The integration of these add-ons within the ADELE tool is helpful to facilitate the invocation of heterogeneous WSs with a high abstraction level. In addition, we describe as an example, an Internet of Thing (IoT) scenario where the approach presented in this paper is very helpful. Finally, we also evaluate an ADELE application for giving home comfort employing heterogeneous WSs.