Agency services: an agent-based and services-oriented model for building large virtual communities

Abstract

Despite the current importance of internet and the increasing appearance of virtual societies, there is still no widespread adoption of intelligent agents. Building solutions based on intelligent agents is not a simple task because of the complex nature of the problems that they face, which are mainly related to planning, cooperation and negotiation tasks. In order to overcome those difficulties, and in line with the recent success of the Cloud Computing model, this paper proposes a new model in which brokers able to represent users in virtual societies are offered as one more service of the cloud. The paper also details the technologies necessary to construct a realistic solution which, apart from abstracting the user from all the details of the implementation, loses none of the characteristic advantages of solutions based on agents and Cloud Computing.