Toward Dynamic Interoperability of Mobile Agent Systems

Mobile agents are an increasingly popular paradigm and in recent years there has been a proliferation of mobile-agent systems. These systems are, however, largely incompatible with each other. In particular, agents cannot migrate to a host that runs a different mobile-agent system. Prior approaches to interoperability have tried to force agents to use a common API and so far none have succeeded. This goal led to our efforts to develop mechanisms that support dynamic runtime interoperability of mobile-agent systems. This paper describes the \em Grid Mobile-Agent System, which allows agents to migrate to different mobile-agent systems

Network Awareness for Wireless Peer-to-Peer Collaborative Environments

Presentation to the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Science. Hilton Waikoloa Village, Island of Hawaii, 5-8 January 2004.The implications of using mobile wireless communications are significant for emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) collaborative environments. From a networking perspective, the use of wireless technologies to support collaboration may impact bandwidth and spectrum utilization. This paper explores the effects of providing feedback to system users regarding wireless P2P network behavior on the performance of collaboration support applications. We refer to this operational feedback as "network awareness." The underlying premise is that providing feedback on the status of the network will enable users to self-organize their behavior to maintain quality of data sharing. Results achieved during an experiment conducted at the Naval Postgraduate School demonstrate significant effects of roaming on application sharing performance and integration with client-server applications. A solution for improving network aware P2P collaboration, identified in the experiment, is discussed

Implementing an Information Retrieval and Visualization Framework for Heterogeneous Data Types

In today\u27s information focused world, there is no lack of entities focused on information gathering. However, there is still a widespread epidemic of information starvation in the Department of Defense (DoD). This starvation is attributed to the lack of interoperability between information gatherers and information consumers. To alleviate this problem, the DoD has put forth a vision of a Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI). This research proposes a framework for sharing and finding resources in a JBI. The framework uses an extensible metadata specification, agent technology, and the Control of Agent Based Systems (CoABS). It provides several tools for publication and subscription of resources, including a visual query wizard and a visualization of the results. This framework and tools provide visual query capability for the heterogeneous resources within the JBI

Automated Agent Ontology Creation for Distributed Databases

In distributed database environments, the combination of resources from multiple sources requiring different interfaces is a universal problem. The current solution requires an expert to generate an ontology, or mapping, which contains all interconnections between the various fields in the databases. This research proposes the application of software agents in automating the ontology creation for distributed database environments with minimal communication. The automatic creation of a domain ontology alleviates the need for experts to manually map one database to other databases in the environment. Using several combined comparison methods, these agents communicate and negotiate similarities between information sources and retain these similarities for client agent queries without the manual mapping of different data sources achieving an average accuracy of 57% before leader negotiation and an average accuracy of 61% after leader negotiation. The best matching accuracy achieved in a single test is 79%. This is directly applicable to the Department of Defense (DOD) that possesses many systems, which share information that enables the military to achieve their objectives. The DOD created an environment called the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) to solve this integration problem. This research improves upon the JBI\u27s use of exact matching of field names for integrating the information within the environment. It simulates this type of interaction by demonstrating agents wrapped around different databases negotiating and generating an ontology. An agent-generated ontology is compared with an expert generated ontology and testing uses a set of queries run against the ontologies show that this technique can be useful in a distributed information environment

Agent Societies: Magnitude and Duration

If you only need agents to search the Web for cheap CDs, scalability is not an issue. The Web can support numerous agents if each acts independently. In short order, however, billions of embedded agents that sense their environment and interact with us and other agents will fill our world, making the human environment friendlier and more efficient. These agents will need not only scalable infrastructures and communication services, but also scalable social services encompassing ethics and laws. Research projects are under way around the world to develop and deploy such services. The author takes a look at the critical relationship between scalability and intelligent agents

Software Agents as Facilitators of Coherent Coalition Operations

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.Software agents can be viewed as semi-autonomous entities which help people cope with the complexities of working collaboratively in a distributed information environment. This paper describes the research that DERA is carrying out into Software Agents for use in Command Systems and the collaborative work with the 16 partners of an international Coalition Agents Experiment. Specifically, the paper aims to show that using software agent-based C2 frameworks is a useful way of dealing with the complexity of real-world problems such as supporting agile and robust Coalition operations and enabling interoperability between legacy or previously incompatible systems. In addition, Agent-enabled 'grids' can be used to rapidly integrate a wide variety of agents and infrastructures, with domain management services structuring agent relationships, limiting their behaviours and enforcing Coalition policies

Dynamic Agent Systems in the CoAX Binni 2002 Experiment

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The goal of the international CoAX (Coalition Agents eXperiment) program was to demonstrate how agent systems could be used to provide agile and flexible command and control systems for coalition operations, and facilitate rapid integration of national C2 systems. The CoAX experiments modelled a coalition C4ISR system as a distributed, heterogeneous agent network using the DARPA CoABS (Control of Agent Based Systems) Grid infrastructure based on Java JINI technology. This paper outlines the CoAX Binni experiment which was held in October 2002 at the US Naval Warfare College, Newport RI. It describes the technology used in this experiment and the role of the ATTITUDE multi-agent architecture in the Australian component of the experiment. This involved logistics planning (and dynamic replanning) for a casualty evacuation from an Australian ship using BDI agents developed in the ATTITUDE architecture, and included interactions with Coalition medical and planning agents. Distributed agents were used to represent the various organisational entities involved in a simplified logistics model, and agent interactions with the Coalition C4ISR system were mediated by human operators using I-X Process Panels. This provided a semi-autonomous system, where human approval initiated further autonomous interactions between Coalition and Australian agents

Implementação e análise de uma arquitetura de grids de agentes para a gerência de redes e sistemas

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação.O gerenciamento centralizado de redes de computadores, telecomunicações e de sistemas pode nos levar a situações em que grandes volumes de dados precisam ser manipulados e analisados por uma única estação de gerenciamento na rede. Além do alto custo, tal abordagem tem se apresentado pouco extensível à medida que cresce o número de dispositivos no ambiente gerenciado. Frente a este problema, este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura baseada em grids de agentes aplicável ao gerenciamento de redes de computadores e de sistemas. Tal abordagem tem como objetivo básico aplicar princípios da computação em grid, usando agentes de software como infra-estrutura para construção do grid, com o objetivo de otimizar alguns problemas inerentes ao gerenciamento centralizado como a manipulação e análise de grande volume de informação de gerenciamento. Também no escopo deste trabalho são descritos detalhes de implementação da arquitetura de grid proposta e a realização de experimentos em cenários de gerenciamento de sistemas usando um sistema baseado na proposta apresentada