We present our practical experience in implementing agent-based systems for provision and selection of Grid services. The agents form a marketplace where services are offered and searched. Agents communicate semantic information about services using the Web service ontology (OWL-S). We describe our implementations that are built using Globus Toolkit, utilize the JADE agent framework and the off-the-shelf OWL-S toolkit. This combination of technologies can be also used for (semi-) automatic composition of services. Our evaluation captures the relative costs of different stages during service provision and selection that allows detecting potential bottlenecks. The preliminary evaluation already suggests that representation of semantics information and in particular existing solutions for reasoning on the semantic information need major improvements.

CVs:

Konstantin Popov

Konstantin Popov is a senior reseracher in the distributed systems laboratory (DSL) at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). He is involved with the development, implementation and maintenance of the programming language Oz and the programming system Mozart since its very early days more than 10 years ago. Recently he closely collaborated in the iCities project where he contributed the large-scale, parallel version of the simulation system. Currently he is actively involved in the Grid-related research, and manages SICS's participation in the European NoE CoreGrid. His scientific interests include also the implementation of programming languages, in particular high-performance parallel and distributed programming systems, as well the foundations of programming languages such as formal semantics and type systems.

Vladimir Vlassov

Dr. Vladimir Vlassov received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering
from the Electrotechnical University of St. Petersburg, Russia (1984), where he was an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor during 1985-1993. In 1993, he joined the Department of Microelectronics and Information Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, where he is currently a Associate Professor in Computer Systems. In 1998, Dr. Vlassov worked as a visiting scientists in the Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. In 2004, we worked as a researcher at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Massachusetts (UMASS) Amherst, USA. His current research interests include parallel and distributed computing, peer-to-peer and Grid computing, web services and agents.