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.