Mobile agents can benefit from standards efforts on interagent communication

Abstract

On the road to the future success of mobile agents, we believe that interagent 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 in which 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 present current standards efforts relevant to agent communication.