An Infrastructure to Support Cooperation of Knowledge-Level Agents on the Semantic Grid

Can a Knowledge-Level layer be located in the Semantic Grid infrastructure? Is it possible to design an Agent Communication Language (ACL) which enables Knowledge-Level agents to cooperate in a geographically distributed Semantic Grid despite nodes' failures or malfunctions? This paper tries to address the above Semantic Grid challenges presenting an agent-based Open Service Architecture which integrates geographically distributed agents in a Semantic Grid. The architecture is well integrated with standard Internet components and technologies and supports communication among Knowledge-Level agents. The role of agents is to retrieve, execute and compose available services providing more sophisticated instances of them. Inter-agent communication is realized by exploiting an advanced Agent Communication Language which supports a fault-tolerant anonymous interaction protocol and satisfies a set of well defined Knowledge-Level programming requirements. Here, we present the design of the architecture and of the Agent Communication Language as well as their implementation. The architecture is evaluated by means of several case studies which highlight the main feature of our proposal. The main advantage of our approach is to demonstrate that different issues, such as high level inter-agent communication and fault tolerance, can be successfully integrated in Grid infrastructures which provide Web Services maintaining a clean design of the architecture and a Knowledge-Level characterization.