"Intelligent, Strategic and Verifiable Agent-based Communities of Web Services: Theoretical Foundations and Automation"

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Web services are hailed for their role as implementation technology of service computing. The widespread development and use of this technology for Business-to-Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) have recently contributed in identifying an evolutionary way of organizing and deploying web services by gathering the ones having similar functionalities in the same "virtual" space, called Communities of Web Services (CWSs). CWSs permit to create pockets of expertise and settings of both cooperation and competition to provide the users with the best services. To achieve the full potential of this emerging concept, web services are perceived to be equipped, through agents, with semantic information and rich interaction, reasoning, and decision making capabilities so that business contracts and community joining benefits can be negotiated. However, despite recent and numerous initiatives around specifying, engineering, and securing CWSs, several fundamental issues and problems remain unresolved and yet to be addressed, mainly because of lack of rigorous theoretical foundations. To make CWSs the technology of choice for B2C, B2B and e-applications, there is an urgent need to provide researchers and engineers with strong theoretical foundations to support and analyze flexible and efficient interactions, decision making, verification, and security, which are core to the emerging applications. The first aim of this project is to raise the state of the art in service computing from a level where services are simply reactive entities and deployed individually, to a level where they are empowered with semantics and advanced reasoning and strategic decision making capabilities and deployed within communities. The second aim is to advance the research into CWSs from a level where web services and communities are designed in an impromptu way to a level where theoretical foundations are established allowing sound engineering using formal methods and techniques, namely formal economic models, game theory, computational logic, and model checking. The ultimate objective of this project is to contribute in the social and economic development of Canada by contributing in the growth of its service industry.