Multi-Agent Systems

Tessera is an experimental hybrid agent system that incorporates the use of agent contexts that are used to explore and survey information from heterogeneous data sources. An agent context consists of knowledge e.g. ontology, domain content, and data sources that are used locally to manage information domains. Agent contexts are loaded into an agent. Then the agent is given tasks to perform on various information domains. These contexts represent a distributed component that can be used in bridging heterogeneous environments. These agents provide a domain mediation layer through which virtual views of the web can be built.

"What is an agent?", someone asks. This was the main question that I received when I began to get on my soapbox and talk about the my life's passion to fellow workers. Another person answers, "An agent is nothing more than a program, all programs are agents". Agent systems are complex, rule-based systems. Today there exist agent frameworks, agent IDE's, distributed agent systems, agent communication frameworks. It seems to me the definition of an agent system gets diluted somewhat.

I am so excited about the technology that I spent my lunches talking openly about them, teaching thinking that I could immerse myself and apply all my graduate work toward it. I guess everyone is now a agent expert.

I have been focused in the this field since 1997. It was a bit of an itch back then, and now I have spent enough time with it to move into a few different areas. My first project in the field was to develop a concept and system that focused on "Agent Context". The project is called Tessera. I chose the word tessera because it is a single tile in a mosaic, and the metaphor fit well with the project.

The second project I worked on is called Flatworld. This is a 2D world in which various types of agents live free. There are two types of agents that currently act in this world, gang members, workers. The gang members has a predator type behavior in that they like to swarm around individual workers. Workers like to exist in family units and occupy apartments.

The third project attempt that I am starting focuses on agent communication languages. I am looking a developing a messaging framework that supports the transfer of knowledge. This project is called the Open Pervasive Computing Environment "open-pce". This project is just starting up.