I told my advisor I’d have him a draft of a paper within 48 hours. I think that was pretty reasonable given that he decided we should submit only 96 hours before the deadline.

I just mailed him a solid first draft. It’s reasonably smooth, although I’m not completely happy with it. I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep in a couple of days, but I think I can relax this evening and try to get caught up on my rest. I’m going to need to get back at it early tomorrow, so I’ll need my rest.

Still, I feel like I’ve done a pretty good couple of days’ work.

I missed my weekly meeting with my advisor last week because of meetings at work that ran late. I didn’t mind much, because I hadn’t made a lot of progress on the task he set me the previous week. He asked me to look into devising a protocol that service agents could use to negotiate among themselves to offer better deals to potential users.

After looking into possible agent communication protocols, it was obvious that the Contract Net Protocol and Iterated  Contract Net Protocol published by Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) met the needs of the mechanics of the communication if not the content. All of the work I could find that related to contract negotiation among agents used one of these protocols as the basis for their negotiation. So I turned my attention to the content of the communications, but I wasn’t making much progress.

Missing the meeting worked out well; I had a flash of inspiration earlier this week. I can use the Contract Net protocols for the mechanics of the communication, and on top of that I can layer a means for agents to know what other agents are in their potential workflow with them, then adjust their initial offer up or down based on their affinity for each of their neighbors.

I explained my idea to my advisor during out meeting this week, which went very well. In fact, it went a little too well. He liked the idea enough that he thought we could put together a paper for a conference whose deadline is “at the end of the month.” That’s the good news. The bad news is that deadline isn’t really the end of the month. It’s actually October 24. As in Monday; as in four days from our meeting yesterday.

So I spent a fair bit of last night writing furiously, and I’ll do the same tonight. I let my advisor know that unless the deadline has been moved the paper is due Monday, but I’d have him something within 48 hours.

It’s going to be a long night.

It has been way too long since I’ve updated this. I will be more diligent about it.

I’ve been meeting with my advisor weekly for most of this semester so far. Each time, I’ve fleshed out more and more of the details of how I’d like my research topic to shape up. At this point, I think I’m close to having a complete architecture that I can start working toward implementing to prove my ideas will work.

So far, I’ve laid out several items. First, a high-level architecture describing the main components needed to construct an automated workflow composition capability. Along with that, I’ve laid out the sequence of steps that those components need to execute to correctly parse through a BPMN model and pick out services needed to execute that workflow.

I’ve also specified some basic definitions and equations to capture the formal definitions and relations needed to compose services into workflows. And as of this week, I’ve detailed the major decision points necessary to compose services. This includes mapping services to individual activities in the process model, deciding which services can be composed together, how to analyze the quality of service attributes and recommend a choice of service compositions, and the factors to be considered when evaluating quality of service across complex workflows.

Now I need to specify the metadata that needs to be attached to a process model, plus an overall detailed architecture for the system. Luckily I did a fair bit of that work over the summer and I just need to formalize it.