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Project: Agent Configuration
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The Agent Factory is the most challenging configuration service
addressed within IIDS. Within a highly dynamic heterogeneous
environment, such as the Internet, agents need to be able to adapt to
new situations and the resulting new requirements. The Agent Factory
makes this possible. The Agent Factory itself has 3 main facilities:
(1) Retrieval Service, (2) Design Centre and (3) Assembly. The Design
Centre has been the focus of much of our research in this field. Its
architecture is based on the Generic Model of Design described
elsewhere.
The Agent Factory as a whole (re-)designs software agents that have
been designed to be redesigned:
- Agents have a compositional structure: templates define structures
within which components can be added/deleted and/or modified,
- Meta-level descriptions of templates and components provide
knowledge needed to determine whether components can be used in open
slots in templates at both a conceptual level and an operational, The
Agent Factory works on the assumptions that:
- libraries of components exist.
- shared ontologies exist.
- meta-level descriptions provide enough detail to guide configuration processes.
The main advantage of an agent factory as an automated servicing
process is that an agent can easily obtain new functionality, without
obliging the agent itself to have its own adaptation mechanism.
Prototype implementations have been built for domains such as
information retrieval agents.
Current Research
Current research focuses on:
- learning from experiences with different conceptual and operational description languages,
- designing and implementing more extensive prototypes of the agent factory,
- building a library of building blocks,
- designing a template specification language,
- designing description languages for properties of interfaces of, and knowledge on the use of, templates and components,
Current developments
In 2003, the agent facotry has been used for generative migration
between Jade and FIPA-OS. We expect to learn from research in the
area of web-service configuration, in which building blocks and
their descriptions are more standardised and more readily available.
Acknowledgements
This research on the agent factory is part of our research on software
agent (re-)configuration and services for large-scale heterogeneous
distributed agent operating systems.
See our main Research Projects page for more information on other
IIDS projects. This research project is financially supported by
Stichting NLnet and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
