I spent the weekend working on my prototype implementation using some service agents I had kicking around from previous work. I added a “graph agent” that collects information from the various service agents and assembles them into a directed graph for further analysis. Building the initial graph turned out to be pretty easy. There’s a very easy-to-use directed graph library called JGraphT that made the task pretty simple.

Now comes the hard part: verifying that the graph is correct. The easiest way to do that is to see it, so I followed the recommendation on the JGraphT site and downloaded the JGraph library. It’s a commercial product, but it does have a free license for non-commercial use.Unfortunately, the latest version (called JGraphX) doesn’t have a simple importer for the latest version of JGraphT, but the previous version, JGraph v5, still works pretty seamlessly wiht JGraphT. It wasn’t too hard to get the graph to display in a window, but figuring out how to do it with a reasonably useful layout is proving tricky. By default, it lays out with all of the vertices stacked on top of each other. But it is a start.

Now I need to troubleshoot why the edges aren’t behaving the way I expect them to; only some of them are correct. I think I’ve got an idea, but it will take a little time to code up and check. But in the meantime, I am making progress.

I survived the mad rush to complete that paper in 96 hours. I successfully submitted it and now I’m waiting to hear whether it was accepted or not. My advisor told me it was a good job and he liked the final product, so that was good news. There were 14 papers submitted for that particular workshop. It’s a one-day event, so I expect there will be about 7 papers selected. Those aren’t bad odds.

I spoke to my advisor this past Friday and he told me again that he thought it was a good paper, so I’m cautiously optimistic about my chances of being accepted. In the meantime, I have begun some implementation work to try and show the work i described in the paper. I’m successfully parsing a BPMN model and launching individual agents for each task in the model, so I’m off to a decent start. Now I am trying to figure out how to assemble the discovered services into a connected graph. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I need to mull them over a little more.

In the meantime, I still have a fighting chance of completing my research by the end of the spring semester.