Enabling Peer-to-Peer Resource Discovery in Agent Environment

December 1, 2001 - August 1, 2002

Negotiation, co-operation and collaboration between multi-agents systems are the key to success in the agent world. An agent that is capable of these actions can offer them as services. The main challenge lies in discovering the agents that provides such services. FIPA architecture facilitates service discovery process with the help of Directory Facilitator (DF), but the service discovery process is limited to a particular Agent Platform. Federation between the DFs would lead to a Gnutella type peer-to-peer network, which is neither scalable nor efficient. In this paper we propose modifications to existing Directory Facilitator to enhance the global service discovery among the agent platforms. We propose a scalable architecture, which forms decentralized clusters of Directory Facilitators. These clusters are self-governing, fault-tolerant and support global service discovery. We also discuss ways to exploit the proposed architecture and hence improve the performance of the service discovery process.

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