Design and implementation of autonomous agent architecture for sage

Abstract

Multi-agent systems (MAS) advocate an agent-based approach to software engineering base don decomposing problems in terms of decentralised, autonomous agents that can engage inflexible, high-level interactions. Scalable, fault tolerant Agent Grooming Environment (SAGE), a second generation MAS offers a decentralized, fault tolerant agent framework unlike the first generation MASs. Currently the system framework of SAGE is in place, and a well defined agent architecture needs to be developed which will allow development of autonomous and intelligent agents on top of this decentralized system. The aim of the project was to design and develop ahybrid agent architecture in such a holistic and well defined manner that has not figured in the domain of FIPA-Compliant architectures so far. The existing architectures reside on top ofcentralized frameworks and primarily offer reactive behaviour support. The novelty of this Hybrid approach is that it allows agents to practically reason about their behaviour in addition to reactive and deliberative behaviour. This has not been previously done in the first generation MASs e.g.JADE, FIPA-OS. The highlight of the architecture is that it gives a generic design of sophisticated agent models such as BDI and reactive architectures with in well defined modules. Also presented is the design and implementation of a high level agent application which depicts the synergy of software agents, Grid Computing and the web services (Agent Web Gateway). The application not only validates the architecture but also illustrates the coordination of different entities by agents acting as owners in heterogeneous and dynamically changing environments.