Possibilistic Petri nets as a basis for agent service description language

In the making of a service-oriented multiagents framework, two pivotal issues need to be addressed: agent service description language (ASDL) and its service matchmaking mechanism. ASDL provides a specification of publishing and requesting services for agents, and matchmaking is the process of finding an appropriate service for a request through a medium. In this paper, a possibilistic Petri net-based agent service description language (PPN-ASDL) is proposed as an advanced ASDL with four key features: possibilistic transitions to represent a service or a request; input places to denote preconditions expected to hold before performing the services, output places to denote postconditions expected to hold after performing the services; and possibility and necessity measures to quantify the confidence levels that an agent can provide the relevant service for a request. A matchmaking mechanism, permitting a relaxed match for close semantics, is also developed to search for the possible services among agents for a request. © 2003 Elsevier B.V. All righs reserved.