Agent Communication Using Publish-Subscribe Genre: Architecture, Mobility, Scalability and Applications
Amir Padovitz, Arkady Zaslavsky, Seng W. Loke, Milovan Tosic · 2004
Abstract — Mobile agent communication in multi-agent communities is still very much a research challenge. We analyze and discuss the suitability of current technologies for interconnecting heterogeneous agent platforms and multi-agent systems and propose a publish-subscribe, or in other words, event notification mechanism as an efficient and effective complementary solution to software mobile agent communication. We advocate the event-based communication genre for exchanging and disseminating large volumes of small lightweight messages. We discuss our work in that area towards building content- and context-based messaging for agent communication, i.e. the ability to refer to and send messages to a collection of agents based on their current context, without knowing the precise identities of the agents. We investigate the feasibility of this paradigm and offer our perspective on the future of agent communication in large scale, distributed multi-agent systems. Index Terms — mobile agents, publish-subscribe communication, context-based messaging, multi-agent systems I.