The open agent architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems

Abstract

The Open Agent Architecture OAA, developed and used for several years at SRI International, makes it possible for software services to be provided through the cooperative e orts of distributed collections of autonomous agents. Communication and cooperation between agents are brokered by one or more facilitators, which are responsible for matching requests, from users and agents, with descriptions of the capabilities of other agents. Thus, it is not generally required that a user or agent know the identities, locations, or number of other agents involved in satisfying a request. OAA is structured so as to minimize the e ort involved in creating new agents and wrapping" legacy applications, written in various languages and operating on various platforms; to encourage the reuse of existing agents; and to allow for dynamism and exibility i n the makeup of agent communities. Distinguishing features of OAA as compared with related work include extreme exibility in using facilitator-based delegation of complex goals, triggers, and data management requests; agent-based provision of multimodal user interfaces; and built-in support for including the user as a privileged member of the agent community. This paper explains the structure and elements of agent-based systems constructed using OAA. The characteristics and use of each major component o f O AA infrastructure are described, including the agent library, the Interagent Communication Language, capabilities declarations, service requests, facilitation, management of data repositories, and autonomous monitoring using triggers. To provide technical context, we describe the motivations for OAA's design, and situate its features within the realm of alternative software paradigms. A summary is given of OAA-based systems built to date, and brief descriptions are given of several of these.2

An agent-based framework for petroleum information services from distributed heterogeneous data resources

“…Much of the foundational work on agent technology has focused on methodologies to build agent-oriented systems [3,4,5,8,12], inter-agent communication protocols [4,5,14], and agent-based application systems. Many agent-based models or frameworks were proposed for some specific applications.…”

“…It is not suitable for modeling open systems and controlling the behavior of self-interested agents [15]. The OAA made it possible for software services to be provided through the cooperative efforts of distributed collections of autonomous agents [8]. Communication and cooperation between agents were brokered by one or more facilitators, which were responsible for matching requests, from users and agents, with descriptions of capabilities of other agents.…”

“…Another part combines with DFM role and DBM role to form a new agent type, namely, IM agent type, which wraps the distributed heterogeneous data resources as an agent-based platform. From the OAA viewpoint [8], IM agent type and DHDRs comprise facilitator agent. The facilitator is a specialized server agent that is responsible for coordinating agent communications and cooperative problem solving.…”

“…The facilitator is a specialized server agent that is responsible for coordinating agent communications and cooperative problem solving. In our system, the facilitator is used to provide a global data manipulation for its client agents, which allows them to adopt a blackboard style of interaction [8]. The interactions between the agent types follow the rules defined in acquaintance model.…”

“…In this paper, we employed some ideas of Gaia methodology [12] and Open Agent Architecture (OAA) [8] to contribute an agent-based framework to perfectly achieve the chief goal. The framework consists of three levels, namely, role mode, agent type, and agent instance.…”