UMBC ebiquity
Coordination of Internet Agents: Models, Technologies, and Applications
Coordinating agents using agent communication languages conversations
March 19, 2001
Internet agents are expected to accomplish their tasks despite heterogeneity; agents of different designs and varying skills and domain knowledge need to interact successfully through knowledge and information exchange and effective coordination. An Agent Communication Language (ACL) is a powerful framework for interacting agents in open and dynamic environments. Although an ACL provides a framework for knowledge sharing between agents, it is, by itself, inadequate for coordination between agents. Conversations, i.e., well-specified sequences of message exchanges geared towards particular tasks, use ACL messages as building blocks for scripted, task-oriented interactions between agents. Such well-specified conversations, with testable properties, can be used to coordinate the behavior among communicating agents that attempt to accomplish the tasks specified by conversations.
