A Resource Negotiation Infrastructure for Self-Managing Applications

The negotiation infrastructure presented hides the complexity of managing access and usage of heterogeneous and distributed resources, by providing a uniform negotiation infrastructure to aggregate resource access within a virtual domain. For additional implementation details regarding the application of the negotiation architecture in the AgentScape middleware (Mobach et al., 2005). The focus of our current and future work includes extension of the architecture and model with application level components, facilitating the integration and implementation of resource negotiation interactions into applications. For example, in the AgentScape middleware, a WS-Agreement based Agent Communication Language would allow agents to interact with the resource negotiation infrastructure in a way that facilitates knowledge sharing, knowledge modeling, and expression of performatives that agents are permitted to use. Furthermore, the addition of more expressive and flexible negotiation protocols are being devised to allow both applications and resources more fine-grained control of the negotiation process. Other future work studies negotiation strategies in various settings including the dynamics of agreements, i.e., when agreements cannot be met, or when they are deliberately violated or cancelled