Facilitating Agent Development in Open Service Architectures

Several recent research efforts are focused on the development of open service-oriented architectures, which provide the basic infrastructure for the integration of Web Services distributed across the Internet in heterogeneous and dynamic Virtual Organizations. Agents have been recognized as one of the main technologies to exploit these services, but their role is not yet fully understood. One of the main technical problems that at the moment prevent a large scale exploitation of agents in open service architectures is that programming a set of geographically distributed agents is a complex task which needs adequate skills and tools to be carried out successfully. In this paper we address this issue presenting a modular and open agent communication infrastructure, which has been designed to facilitate the programming task in open, geographically distributed multi-agent systems. To highlight the level of innovation of our communication infrastructure, we present a case study showing how high-level multicast requests of knowledge can be easily programmed.