Every agent a web server, every agent community an intranet…

摘要

The research community is struggling with the right approach to integrate emerging agent technology with the exploding web page- based Internet. This paper presents the approach used in Cognitive Agent Architecture (Cougaar) under DARPAs Advanced Logistics Project (ALP). In this effort, each agent was constructed with a build- in web server, supported by specialized API for easy creation of modular PlugIns which transforms agent internal object structures into XML and formatted HTML. In addition, the project has developed an efficient set of techniques for transparent proxies to allow any agent entry- point to serve as an Intranet portal to the whole community of agents. Further, as each agent holds only its part of the plan, the underlying infrastructure transparently supports traversal across the boundaries of one agents plan into that of a different agent. Thus the interfaces support a visualization of the global plan though physically it is a partitioned blackboard distributed among many agents on different machines. The benefit of this approach is that developers can easily build specialized user interfaces into the agent internal plans and state which is accessible through a standard browser by connecting to any agent URL in the society.