Intelligent Agent Infrastructure

We have been developing an autonomous-agent scheduling system for a U.S. Army Arsenal (http://www.aaria.uc.edu). The project is funded by the U.S. Dept. of Defense, DARPA. As a part of the project we have developed an agent infrastructure we call the Intelligent Agent Infrastructure (IAI). The IAI provides a transparent infrastructure for agent residence on heterogeneous platforms, where all agents can communicate with other agents, but are unaware of where other agents may reside. IAI provides for subject-based addressing of agents and multi-casting. It provides services for agent mobility, and creation and destruction. It is designed for high performance with a high degree of scalability. Agents can be self-motivated and asynchronous, or can respond to events.

We use the IAI to enable 1000 agents to reside on 10 computers and be unaware of each others location. Agents can communicate with each other, migrate, die, or be born without effecting the other agents in the system.

We would like to see standardization on communications between agents, along the lines of the ISO/OSI with definiations at the highest levels of the protocol. This standardization would allow true subject-based and multicast message passing between agents which are writen by different users running on different platforms but connected by a common communications medium. The standardization should allow dynamic addition and subtraction of any agent or group of agents in the system without the rest of the system hanging. This is a capability currently supported in IAI and which we would like to see supported outside IAI.

Dr. Albert D. Baker
Agent-Based Manufacturing Lab.
University of Cincinnati
Mail Location 30
634A Rhodes Hall
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0030
USA
Tel.: +1 513 556 4782
Fax: +1 513 556 7326]]
Email: bert.baker@uc.edu