Dynamic service matchmaking among agents in open information environments
Katia Sycara, Matthias Klusch, Seth Widoff, Jianguo Lü · ACM SIGMOD Record · 1999
Introduction The amount of services and deployed software agents in the most famous offspring of the Internet, the World Wide Web, is exponentially increasing. In addition, the Internet is an open environment, where information sources, communication links and agents themselves may appear and disappear unpredictably. Thus, an effective, automated search and selection of relevant services or agents is essential for human users and agents as well. We distinguish three general agent categories in the Cyberspace, service providers, service requester, and middle agents. Service providers provide some type of service, such as finding information, or performing some particular domain specific problem solving. Requester agents need provider agents to perform some service for them. Agents that help locate others are called middle agents[2]. Matchmaking is the process of finding an appropriate provider for a requester thr