Integration of mobile agents and web services

The web service specification represents an open standard for distributed service oriented architectures, already impacting a broad range of commerce and industry. Web services are widely used in current web-based business applications, and form the basis of emerging frameworks in Grid computing. Current mobile agent systems implement similar (often proprietary) mechanisms for service description, invocation and discovery. Furthermore, mobile agents provide very specific advantages with respect to dynamic and concurrent service composition resp. execution, as well as the extension of server-sided services with client-side intelligence and functionality. This short paper introduces an architecture which seamlessly connects mobile agents with web services in a transparent and fully automated manner by means of a specialized Web Service Engine. This Web Service Engine has been implemented and integrated into the Secure Mobile Agents (SeMoA1) platform