A Scalable Agent Location Mechanism

Abstract

Large scale open multi-agent systems where agents need services of other agents but may not know their contact information require agent location mechanisms. Solutions to this problem are usually based on middle-ware such as matchmakers, brokers, yellow-pages agents and other middle agents. The disadvantage of these is that they impose infrastruc- ture, protocol and communication overheads, and they do not easily scale up. We suggest a new approach to agent location, which does not re- quire middle agents and protocols for using them. Our approach is simple and scales up with no infrastructure or protocol overheads, thus may be very useful for large scale MAS. In this paper, we analytically study the properties of our approach and discuss its advantages.