Canal: a distributed service composition system using mobile agents

Abstract

Service composition is the operation of forming a complex service from existing services by discovering, integrating and executing those services. Such an operation is very useful and common in grid computing, especially in e-science. There are many service composition systems, but most of them need a centralized manager to handle the composition. In this paper, we present a fully distributed service composition system. The design of our system is based on a peer-to-peer model and a mobile agent approach to composing the services. We have implemented a platform, called Canal, for composing services. Developers can easily set up their services on the Canal to provide the composite service.