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http://dx.doi.org/10.3745/KTSDE.2014.3.3.125

A Multi-Agent Message Transport Architecture for Supporting Close Collaboration among Agents  

Chang, Hai Jin (상명대학교 소프트웨어공학과)
Publication Information
KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering / v.3, no.3, 2014 , pp. 125-134 More about this Journal
Abstract
This paper proposes a multi-agent message transport architecture to support application areas which need fast message communications for close collaboration among agents. In the FIPA(Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents) agent platform, all message transfer services among agents are in charge of a conceptual entity named ACC(Agent Communication Channel). In our multi-agent message transport architecture, the ACC is represented as a set of system agents named MTSA(Message Transfer Service Agent). The MTSA enables close collaboration among agents by supporting asynchronous communication, by using Reactor pattern to handle agent input messages efficiently, and by selecting optimal message transfer protocols according to the relative positional relationships of sender agents and receiver agents. The multi-agent framework SMAF(Small Multi-Agent Framework), which is implemented on the proposed multi-agent message transport architecture, shows better performance on message transfer among agents than JADE(Java Agent Development Environment) which is a well-known FIPA-compliant multi-agent framework. The faster the speed of message transfer of a multi-agent architecture becomes, the wider application areas the architecture can support.
Keywords
Multi-Agent Framework; Close Collaboration; Reactor Pattern; Message Transfer Service; JADE;
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