Software Architecture for Distributed Real-Time Agent Services

Abstract

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. To design 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.