Facilitating Message Exchange through Middle Agents
Abstract
To utilize services provided by other agents, a requesting agent needs to locate and communicate with these service providers. Specifically, in order to interoperate with the providers, the requesting agent should know: 1) the service provider's interface; 2) the ontology that defines concepts used by the provider; and 3) the agent communication language (ACL) the agent uses so that it can parse and understand the communication. Currently deployed Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) encode the interface description and the ontology within a service provider's capability description (or advertisement) that is registered with a Middle Agent; however, this assumes a common ACL between communicating agents. We demonstrate how agents can communicate with each other using a template-based shallow parsing approach to constructing and decomposing messages, thus relaxing assumptions on the ACLs and message formats used.
BibTeX
@conference{Payne-2002-16834,author = {Terence Payne and Rahul Singh and Katia Sycara},
title = {Facilitating Message Exchange through Middle Agents},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS '02)},
year = {2002},
month = {July},
pages = {561 - 562},
}