The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Recently the number of autonomous agents and multiagent systems (MAS) that have been developed by different developers has increased. Despite efforts for the creation of standards (eg. in communication languages, registration protocols etc.), it is clear that at least in the near term heterogeneous agents and MASs will be prevalent. Therefore, mechanisms that allow agents and/or MASs to interoperate and transact are needed. In this paper we report on a case study and lessons learned of an interoperator agent we developed. We discuss requirements for interoperation mechanisms, resulting challenges and our design decisions and implementation of the RETSINA-OAA InterOperator\footnote{The authors thank David Martin, Adam Cheyer and Didier Guzzoni at SRI for their support and help. Marcus Huber of OGI was instrumental in explaining the operation of the OAA-KQML Bridge. In addition we are especially grateful to Martin Van Velsen for his help with the graphical display of the RETSINA and OAA systems and with the data collection for the evaluation section. This research has been sponsored in part by the Office of Naval Research Grant N-00014-96-16-1-1222 by DARPA grant F-30602-98-2-0138.}.

Keywords

multi-agent system, interoperability, MAS, MAS interoperability, RETSINA, OAA, KQML, RETSINA-OAA_InterOperator

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Center for Integrated Manfacturing Decision Systems

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Advanced Agent - Robotics Technology Lab

Associated Project(s): Reusable Environment for Task Structured Intelligent Network Agents and Integrating Intelligent Assistants into Human Teams (Joccasta)

Number of pages: 8

Note: ISBN: 1-58113-230-1

Text Reference

Joseph Andrew Giampapa, Massimo Paolucci, and Katia Sycara, "Agent Interoperation Across Multagent System Boundaries," Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2000), June, 2000.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Giampapa_2000_3281,
   author = "Joseph Andrew Giampapa and Massimo Paolucci and Katia Sycara",
   title = "Agent Interoperation Across Multagent System Boundaries",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2000)",
   publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
   address = "ACM, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY, 10036, USA",
   month = "June",
   year = "2000",
   Notes = "ISBN: 1-58113-230-1"
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu