3. Automatically Manage and Resolve of the Agent Dependencies
In a multi-agent system, agents must collaborate with each other. One agent may use the services provided by another agent. We called this relationship as agent dependence. The topological structure of the dependencies between agents may be a tree or even a net. The Smart Platform can manage and resolve those dependencies.
When each agent joins the computation environment, it must announce the services it provides and the services it depends. Smart Platform will store this information in a persistent storage. If an agent starts up asking for a service and the agent, which provide this service happens not to be in running, the Smart Platform will use the stored knowledge to locate the agents and automatically launch the agent. This feature is called "Agent Dependency Resolution".
By this mechanism, it is no longer needed to manually start all the agents in a Smart Space system. Just start some core agents in a system; the whole system can be put into a determinate state.
4. XML based ICL (Interagent Communication Language)
ICL is the definition of the syntactic structure, and the semantic to some extent, of the messages between agents. We choose the XML as the basis of the syntax of the ICL in Smart Platform. The inherent advantages of XML benefit the Smart Platform in some aspects. (1) The extensibility and its ability to flexibly describe almost all kinds of data makes the ICL can be easily extentended. (2) As the one of standard of technology of Internet, it eases the inter-operation of the Smart Platform with other heterogeneous systems. (3) There are many software libraries for the processing of XML in both industry and academe, which ease the development of the Smart Platform.
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