Combining Web Services and Multi-Agent Technology to Increase Web Cooperative Capacities

Web services are an efficient way to implement Multi-agent Systems (MAS) on the Internet and such systems are particularly adequate for developing and deploying cooperative services. MAS are open systems, with agents that can be added, removed or modified at any moment. They can support large scale net applications with no global vision of the situation. In this paper, we present a Web services architecture that permits the deployment of a multi-agent cooperative navigation system called Mawa. At the beginning it is only composed of an assistant and a connector; the number of agents grow because agents are able to reorganize and restructure information. Firstly, we present the functionalities of Mawa and our model of agents: we considered the Web as a cooperative environment for information retrieval. Then, we describe the agents´ behaviours, the system dynamic and the Web service interfaces of our agents.