10021 Executive Summary – Service-Oriented Architecture and (Multi-)Agent Systems Technology

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) stands for a standards-based and technology-independent distributed computing paradigm and architectural style which is especially suited to meet the demands of today’s dynamic business applications. Based on a comprehensive set of independent or at most loosely-coupled and network-available software services SOA is supposed to provide a platform for an efficient and effective publication, discovery, binding, and assembly of these services. Intelligent agents can be regarded as autonomous, problem-solving computational entities with social abilities that are capable of effective pro-active behavior in open and dynamic environments. If the term entity is replaced by service the substantial overlap in interests between both communities can easily be imagined. Nevertheless, right now the main research focus of each community seems to be different. The SOA community concentrates mainly on developing service engineering methodologies. Active topics in the multi-agent systems community are collaboration, self-organization, adaptability, flexibility, pro-activeness, and interoperability. The overlap between those two communities and the fact that they concentrate on different research topics can definitely be seen as a huge chance since it means that each community may be able to benefit from the research efforts of the other. This seminar brought members from both communities together in order to identify such areas of mutual benefit. After extensive general discussions the seminar concentrated on three topics, namely the engineering of complex distributed systems, its governance, and its adaptability and requirements for dynamism.