Traditional businesses are transitioning into the new roles of service providers. To be successful, they need to be flexible, nimble and value additive in nature. The Internet will be the preferred medium of delivering the services. The customer will expect personalized service with suitably defined quality of service. New and innovative system architectures are required to meet these expectations. We propose an agent-based approach for delivering services on the Net. We believe this necessitates addressing research issues like vocabulary and communication languages and adaptive negotiation protocols which let an agent choose one of the several approaches available to it. We present two examples: a customized financial service and a workflow for conference management to demonstrate the use of a market-oriented approach for procuring priced services, social reasoning model for procuring services that are not priced, basic contract net approach for negotiation on task sharing, or a combination of these in a new situation.
['G. Uma', 'T. Siva Perraju']
Services on the Net: an agent based approach