Workflow Management and Mobile Agents: How to Get the Best of Both Approaches

Abstract

Service composition is an extremely powerful and versatile way to aggregate and reuse distributed services and software components into richer and complex scenarios. Workflow Management Systems have emerged as one of the leading technologies to execute service compositions but typically fail to support distributed scenarios, where distributed services should be invoked in a scalable and effective way. Mobile Agent platforms propose a suitable framework to distribute the execution of complex service compositions, and therefore to enable scalability and improve performance. However, current proposals for MA-based WFMSs still target rather static and poorly distributed scenarios and exploit agent migration benefits only in a partial and insufficient way. The authors’ model proposes to overcome these problems via a richer and more effective agent delegation strategy that can also cope with dynamic scenarios where services can move and replicate, in order to achieve a better integration by taking advantage of both technologies.