4/10/2018
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`The Open Agent
`Architecture
`
`A framework for integrating a community of heterogeneous software agents in a
`distributed environment.
`
`About the Open Agent Architecture
`
`What is an Agent
`Agent Architectures as a programming methodology
`Human calling Agent, come in Agent...
`Technical Features
`Characteristics
`Platforms & Languages
`
`What is an Agent?
`
`The term "agent" has been used by many people to mean many different things.
`Even within the Agent Research Community, there are at least the following
`variants on the term agent: Mobile Agents (e.g. Telescript), Learning Agents,
`Autonomous Agents (e.g. robots), Planning Agents, Simulation agents,
`Distributed Agents.
`
`In the context of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), we are focused on
`building distributed communities of agents, where agent is defined as any
`software process that meets the conventions of the OAA society. An agent satifies
`this requirement by registering the services it can provide in an acceptable form,
`by being able to speak the Interagent Communication Language (ICL), and by
`sharing functionality common to all OAA agents, such as the ability to install
`triggers, manage data in certain ways, etc. In our community of agents, we are
`able to include, and make use of, each of the different types of agents mentioned
`above.
`
`Agent Architectures as a
`programming methodology
`
`Distributed Agent technology can be thought of as the next step in the evolution
`of programming methodologies. In the beginning, there were machine and
`assembly languages. These evolved into higher level programming languages
`able to break apart programming steps into subroutines. A next generalization
`allowed programmers to group collections of subroutines into libraries or
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`modules. A subsequent innovation added the notion of object orientation: data
`and routines could be grouped into a single object, which further encapsulated the
`internals of the routines and increased modularity and reuse. Distributed Object
`technologies, such as CORBA or DCOM, then broke the rule that every object
`must reside on the local machine; now object libraries could post services
`through a broker, and the objects themselves could even be written in different
`programming languages, as long as they used the same Interface Definition
`Language.
`
`So, what can Distributed Agents possibly add to the Distributed Object
`paradigm? With distributed objects, even though objects may run on different
`platforms, applications generally form a single monolithic entity of tightly-bound
`objects, with hand-coded calls to known methods of pre-existing objects.
`
`In a distributed agent framework, we conceptualize a dynamic community of
`agents, where multiple agents contribute services to the community. When
`external services or information are required by a given agent, instead of calling a
`known subroutine or asking a specific agent to perform a task, the agent submits
`a high-level expression describing the needs and attributes of the request to a
`specialized Facilitator agent. The Facilitator agent will make decisions about
`which agents are available and capable of handling sub-parts of the request, and
`will manage all agent interactions required to handle the complex query. The
`advantage? Such a distributed agent architecture allows the construction of
`systems that are more flexible and adaptable than distributed object frameworks.
`Individual agents can be dynamically added to the community, extending the
`functionality that the agent community can provide as a whole. The agent system
`is also able to adapt to available resources in a way that hardcoded distributed
`objects systems can't.
`
`Human calling Agent, come in
`Agent...
`
`When designing the Open Agent Architecture, we realized that it is imperative
`that the human user must be able to interact with the collection of distributed
`agents as an equal member of the community, not just as an outsider to whom is
`presented a result once real agents have done all the work. Multiple agents can
`provide services for retrieval, combination, and management of the growing
`amount of online information, but this is only useful if controlling and interacting
`with the network of agents remains less complicated than interacting with the
`online services themselves!
`
`With this in mind, we designed the InterAgent Communication Language (ICL)
`to be a logic-based declarative language capable of representing natural language
`expressions. In addition, we incorporated techniques into the architecture for
`communicating with agents using simulataneous multiple (natural) input
`modalities; humans can point, speak, draw, handwrite, or use standard graphical
`user interface when trying to get a point across to a collection of agents. The
`agents themselves will compete and cooperate in parallel to translate the user's
`request into an ICL expression to be handled. These techniques, in combination
`with the use of special class of agents called Facilitator agents (Facilitator agents
`reason about the agent interactions necessary for handling a given complex ICL
`expression), allow human users to closely interact with the ever-changing
`community of distributed agents
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`community of distributed agents.
`
`Technical Features
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`https://web.archive.org/web/19970516140126/www.ai.sri.com/~oaa
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`IPA Technologies, Exhibit 2003, Page 3 of 3
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