Facilitating Message Exchange though Middle Agents

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Description/Abstract

To utilize services provided by other agents, a requesting agent needs to locate and communicate with these service providers. Specifically, in order to interoperate with the providers, the requesting agent should know: 1) the service provider’s interface; 2) the ontology that defines concepts used by the provider; and 3) the agent communication language (ACL) the agent uses so that it can parse and understand the communication. Currently deployed Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) encode the interface description and the ontology within a service provider’s capability description (or advertisement) that is registered with a Middle Agent; however, this assumes a common ACL between communicating agents. We demonstrate how agents can communicate with each other using a template-based shallow parsing approach to constructing and decomposing messages, thus relaxing assumptions on the ACLs and message formats used.