Real-Time Agent Service Layer for Distributed Cooperative Computing

Abstract

While distributed multi-agent systems are especially suitable for taking advantage of the capacity for evolution and adaptation in ubiquitous computing, writing such programs is a difficult and complicated task if not supported by an agent programming framework. This paper presents a real-time agent service layer (RT-ASL) that is built on an existing de facto standard for interconnecting distributed objects, CORBA middleware. RT-ASL enables programmers to write distributed cooperative application programs for ubiquitous computing using a high-level abstraction of software agents. As criteria for designing RT-ASL on CORBA, we have made four important decisions regarding the message passing communication mechanism for agent communications, agent service discovery mechanism, real-time agent communication language, and real-time generic scheduling interfaces. This paper justifies the importance of such design decisions and how they can effectively deal with the complicated difficulties.