Using HDS for Realizing Multi-Agent Applications.
Federico Bergenti, Enrico Franchi, Agostino Poggi · 2010
Abstract — Although some of the most important works on multi-agent systems focused on interoperating multi-agent systems with legacy applications, the main results consisted in the definition of two agent communication languages, i.e., KQML and FIPA ACL, and a set of specifications, i.e., the FIPA specifications, for the realization of interoperable multi-agent systems. Nowadays, web services are the primary mean to provide interoperability with legacy applications and the large part of multi-agent applications have been realized without any strong requirement for the interoperability with other multiagent applications. This paper presents the HDS software framework, which provides a software infrastructure to realize multi-agent applications that either take advantage of the specifications for agent-to-agent interoperability or are implemented for optimizing their performance, reducing their development cost and/or simplifying their interaction with some specific legacy applications. Typed messages and message filters are the elements that mainly characterize such a software framework. Besides describing the main features of such a software framework, this paper introduces two different application scenarios designed to exploit HDS features: i) a prototype framework for distributed constraint satisfaction algorithms and ii) a distributed social network system. Index Terms—software framework, multi-agent systems, typed messages, composition filters, Java. S I.