Programming SOA/WS Systems with BDI Agents and Artifact-Based Environments

Agents and Multi-Agent Systems are recognized in the literature as a suitable paradigm for engineering SOA and Web Service systems: however few works explore how to exploit agent programming languages – in particular those based on a strong notion of agency, such as BDI ones – for concretely developing such a kind of systems. In this paper we discuss a general-purpose programming model and a related platform for developing SOA/WS applications exploiting BDI agent technologies. In particular, in order to enable agents to exploit and manage web service technologies in a suitable functional fashion, we investigate the use of Jason agents – based on AgentSpeak(L) programming language –  integrated with artifact-based environments – based on CArtAgO-WS framework.