To help organize the use cases, we divide them into several categories. Some use cases can fit into several categories in which case they can be linked from several different places.
A buyer wants to buy something from an on-line store. This service involves two other independent services, a delivery service and a financing service. Due to the high stakes involved (e.g., it is a Rolls-Royce purchase), the deal involves an escrow account where the buyer deposits some amount of $$.
This is an example of a service to support the selection or generation of plans and their reliable execution. There can be a range of progressively richer planning services in a single application domain or suitable for many domains, and providing services to single or multiple users
This is a service provided to coordinate the independently generated plans of one or more agents to resolve conflicts and exploit unexpected cooperative opportunities. Our service supports both a partial-order and a hierarchical plan representation of agent activity.
In this use case scenario we discuss several approaches to composition, that depend on (i) how the available e-Services are described and (ii) on the degree of reusability of composite e-Service. The purpose of this usage scenario is to illustrate the different forms of composition depending on such features, and show that they require different reasoning support and have various degrees of complexity.
This is an example of a service enabling coordination of operation using coalition resources, described using DAML-S, constrained by heterogeneous distributed set of policies.
A matchmaking or broker agent wants to connect two agents A and B together. Both agents use RDF or some other declarative notation to communicate. The broker is able to translate the notations to some common syntactic base, such as first-order logic or description logic. However, the agents also declare what ontologies they use. Suppose Agent A uses ontologies N1 and N2, and B uses N2, N3, and N4. There is a partial overlap, but there may be a communication failure if a message contains symbols the recipient doesn't expect.