Mobile agents can benefit from standards efforts on inter-agent communication

On the road for the future success of mobile agents, we believe that inter-agent communication is an issue that has not been adequately addressed by the mobile agents community. Supplementing mobile agents with the ability to interact with other mobile or static agents, or agentified information sources is a necessity in the vastly heterogeneous arena where mobile agents are called to compete. Thus, an agent communication language should be interpreted as a tool with the capacity to integrate disparate sources of information. In the first segment, we argue that mobile agents can benefit from current standards efforts on agent communication since the focus of such work is to address heterogeneity by defining a “common language” for communicating agents. In the second part, we discuss ongoing research on agent to agent communication and we present current standards efforts relevant to agent communication. 1 Please send correspondence to the authors at: Tim Finin, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore MD 21250. Voice: 410-455-3522, fax: 410-455-3969, email: [email protected].