Design and Development of Light-weight Agent Management System for FIPA Complaint Multi-Agent System

Abstract

Having frameworks that allow the implementation of personal agents on mobile devices is essential towards a future massive deployment of service-providing agents and their widespread social acceptance. Nomadic application environment is limited by many conditions e.g. memory, bandwidth etc. Running a Multi-Agent System in such environment requires eliminating and in some cases reduction of the effect of these problems. Multi-agent system provides means for a large-scale agent community to share services among themselves by using Agent Communication Language (ACL) with shared semantics. Agents cannot invoke the functions of each other. In order to communicate with other agents, common communication language is required. This document describes the design and implementation details of agent communication language.

We at NUST Institute of IT, developing a FIPA complaint light-weight multi-agent system called SAGE-Lite (Light-weight Scalable Fault tolerant Agent Grooming Environment) to facilitate agent technology on these resource constrained devices. Mandatory component of the system are  Light-weight Agent Management Service (AMS-Lite)  Light-weight Directory Facilitator (DF-Lite)  Light-weight Message Transport Service (MTS-Lite)  Light-weight Agent Communication Language (ACL-Lite)