A Web services and agents-based approach for a better interoperability of enterprises

The interoperability of enterprises is a challenging goal that could be achieved by different approaches and among them the federated ones where different enterprises can inter operate without any particular effort and where the dynamism and the autonomy aspects are supported. In the same time, many technologies have known a considerable success these few years. In one hand, the Web service technology is used to support interoperability but it is still not able to support the dynamism and the autonomy aspects. In the other hand, the agent technology is strongly recommended to support these aspects. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that combines these two technologies for a better interoperability of enterprises. Our approach includes a process that allows Web services, which represent the business functionalities of enterprises, to be discovered, invoked, and composed by agents representing these enterprises. The interoperability mechanism is based on the negotiation on these services. Our approach includes also an architecture supporting this process.