Affiliations: School of Engineering and Built Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Huaglory Tianfield, School of Engineering and Built Environment, Glasgow Caledonian University, Cowcaddens Road, Glasgow, G4 0BA, UK. E-mail: h.tianfield@gcu.ac.uk
Abstract: Current approaches to service composition are mostly based on centralized control model, and suffer from scalability, performance, and robustness issues. In this paper we propose a decentralized multi-agent model for service composition, drawing inspiration from natural systems. The idea is that the composition will “emerge” from local service interaction, using holonic organizational theory for adaptation. In a holonic multi-agent system, a holon is a concept of coalition that is formed through commitments amongst agents and induces an emergent structure amongst agents. A prototype is developed based on JADE platform and web services integration gateway to implement the proposed decentralized multi-agent service composition model. Furthermore, a case study is presented on service composition problem for a distributed generation electricity supply chain. Simulation experiments with different scenarios of the volatile electricity supply chain in distributed generation are conducted to validate our proposed decentralized multi-agent approach. When compared with centralized control approach, which is clearly limited when dealing with large-scale systems, our proposed approach performs favorably in tackling increased systems complexity and scale, though decentralized multi-agent approach does generate a larger message overhead and longer service discovery times.
