OMG Agent Working Group

Minutes of Meeting #7

Minutes: James Odell

Cambridge, MA
November 15-16, 1999

Co-chairs: Stephen McConnell, James Odell, Craig Thompson

Agent Working Group reports to ECDTF and Internet PSIG

OMG Agent WG homepage: http://www.objs.com/agent

Agenda

Business

Attendees
FIPA Liaison report, Frank McCabe, Fujitsu
Green paper status, Jim Odell
Process view of our next steps
RFP Brainstorm
Agenda for next meeting

Presentations

Extending UML for agents (AUML) – Jim Odell

Attendees

Birol Berkem - GOO Tech - berkem@cnam.fr birol.berkem@wanadoo.fr
Hamish Blair - Marconi Communications - hamish.blair@marconicomms.com
Robert Brennan - Teltec DCU - brennanr@teltec.dcu.ie
Melissa Brokalakis - Raytheon - melissa_c_brokalakis@res.raytheon.com
Tim Collins - GTE Laboratories - tcollins@gte.com
Minoru Katayama - Nippon Telegraph and Telephone - katayama@ma.onlab.ntt.co.jp
Heimo Laamanen - Sonera - heimo.laamanen@sonera.fi
David Levine - International Business Machines - dwl@watson.ibm.com
Ross Lillie - Motorola - lillie@rsch.comm.mot.com
Francis McCabe - Fujitsu - fgm@fla.fujitsu.com
Stephen McConnell - OSM - mcconnell@osm.net
Michael McFarren - Bellerophon - mike.mcfarren@bellerophon.com
James Odell - Intellicorp - jodell@compuserve.com
Adolf Pleyer - SAP AG - adolf.pleyer@sap.com
Kimmo Raatikainen - University of Helsinki - kimmo.raatikainen@cs.helsinki.fi
Bjarne Rasmussen - PrismTech - br@us.prismtechnologies.com
David Smith - Deere & Company - ds60162@deere.com
Ben Steele - Questra Consulting - bsteele@questra.com
Kate Stout - Sun Microsystems - kate.stout@sun.com
Craig Thompson - Object Services and Consulting - thompson@objs.com
Junichi Yamamoto - Toshiba - junichi.yamamoto@cs.cmu.edu
Pierre van Aswegen - Ensemble Systems - pva@ensemble-systems.com

FIPA Liaison report – Franck McCabe, Fujitsu

The new direction of FIPA was presented. Don Steiner (Siemans, located in Berkeley) is now president; Francis McCabe (Fujitsu) is now the Vice President. He is also liaison from FIPA to the OMG. David Levine (IBM) volunteered to be the liaison from the OMG to FIPA.

Francis said that the preliminary draft of the FIPA architecture is expected to be released in March 2000. Final would probably not be until Spring 2001. The RFP goes out in July 2000. Francis talked about the FIPA Abstract Architecture a little but not in detail and suggested focusing OMG RFPs on identity services, message transport, and agent discovery services. See further discussion on the RFP roadmap below.

Green paper status – Jim Odell

Overview of version 0.82 presented -- available at http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ec/99-10-02 .

Goals of green paper:

educational goal for OMG - what can you do with agents that you cannot do with existing object stuff
relationship to existing OMG work - examples are brokering, trading, and negotiating
feed the rfp process (see discussion of roadmap and rfps below)
how to take agents and apply into OMG? Also, where OMG technology can be used to create agent platforms. eg services that provide infrastructure. Agents to supplement OMG vs to support OMG.
extract from green paper both policy and motivation into a white paper to provide rationale for RFP roadmap. See below.

Only two new sections of green paper since last time, both by Craig Thompson, one on agent grid and another on agent system-wide properties.

Additional contributions solicited for next meeting:

Summary of relationship with FIPA (*** Frank McCabe)
Nomadic user applications (*** Heimo Laamanen and Kimmo Raatikainen)
Security (*** Kate Stout)
Review comments (*** Robert Hadingham)
Incorporate RFI results (*** Jim Odell)
Update to agents vs objects (*** David Levine)
Agent patterns (*** David Levine and John Roberts)
Harmonization (*** David Levine and Jim Odell)
Identify where agents might benefit from current OMG technologies (e.g., brokering, negotiation, trading)
Identify where OMG technology can be used to create agent platforms
Identify potential RFPs (see roadmap below)
How are agents useful for OMG? More particularly, we need a stronger argument that ACL adds a lot of value. The Green paper should be provide a convincing education to others at OMG and outside the agent community.

Process view of our next steps

Lay of the Agent WG land. We are still cleaning up the green paper. We are now mining it for RFP ideas to get a roadmap and initiate some high priority RFPs.

RFP Brainstorm

Agent identity

Persistent identity over time

Identity belongs to authority
Identify authority

Insuring identity
Authentication

Retiring identity (and shunning, time-bound)
GC issues

One unique id
?: how does this play in existing agent platforms
*** David Levine will write up some basic pre-RFP material

Message transport

Durable, reliable; send/receive
Might need to build a transport gateway
current OMG architecture handles this.
Concrete realization of FIPA transport
Use event or messaging style?
IIOP, events, CORBA, msg, Java msg, com/OLE
Message source and value types
FIPA role, OMG role, gateways
*** Steve will post the messaging service URL to Agents WG for consideration
*** Frank McCabe will write up some basic pre-RFP material

Agent discovery

Registry/directory service
Feature -> identity or name/address -> agent properties
Representational issues
gateways
Any agent that …
Query richness – LDAP Vs much more capable
Ontology issues
Can Trader services be extended?

Content-based, parameterized search by ACL & ontology
Ontology for common attribute or properties
Content languages

Wider community than OMG: properties more abstract- OMG prop, JINI, ….
Rich property service extension to UML
Craig Thompson and David Levine will write up some basic pre-RFP material

Agent/object mobility (triaged - consider requirements sooner so as not to preclude but RFP later)

Orthoganalized; similar to OO mobility plus msg forwarding

UML profile for agents & ACL& agent platforms

What we can do for OMG
*** Jim Odell will champion for now

Configurating and version control (triaged - consider requirements sooner so as not to preclude but RFP later)

RT Upgrade management is relevant

Agent security ("Trust")

Interop Security RFP
FIPA- systematically secure…across transports
In a touchy-feely sort of way, some agent-only issues are:

Who agents tell what to
Whether they are trustworthy or not
Who do you trust and who don’t you trust

Kate Stout will champion for now
Issues:

Sender Identification
Tampering
Encryption

ACL

encoding of ACL
Important issues: support multiple ACLs and extensible ACLs
Also support XML/XMI usage, reflection, dynamic IDL
What is value-added by ACL? Need to make this clear for all OMG
At least be able ascertain structure and methods, but what else?
Frank McCabe will write a piece on the value-added to current OMG technologies.

Ontology

Could provide a technical basis for defining OMG domains
There are a lot of ontologies out there; should we support any or all of them?
While the relationship to XML is to an implementation, XML will be used to define many poor-man ontologies so what does ontology add

Content Language

Reflective aspect

EC brokerage

Registry & Directory
Resource description; xml-based, xml schema value types
Do agents have special requirements over registry/trader? TBD

Agenda for Mesa meeting

First draft of White paper (*** Craig Thompson, Jim Odell, David Levine)
*** Steve McConnell suggests considering relevant work in other OMG groups, and will line up Realtime and Security presentations for Mesa meeting
Elaborate on initial RFP list to become draft roadmap (subject to later revision)
Initial RFP draft material as described below
Presentation on agent security (*** Kate Stout)

Extending UML for agents (AUML) – Jim Odell

Presentation available at http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ec/99-10-03

OA&D TF has an RFI for next generation UML (responses due mid December). What extensions of UML are needed to support agents?

represent agent interaction protocols. Object folks keep saying "objects could do that" but classic objects nor existing UML does not do this. Protocols are just patterns.
make this into a package and further into a template. Can have expansion of one pattern so parts are sub-patterns. Not as a class template but as a process template.
roles
communication acts
ability to send off concurrent threads. Broadcast or multicast to many or all instances of a class.

Discussion led to other suggestions

Templatize operations or relationships or anything.
Examples of multiple roles for same object and its relationship to an object which has different interfaces.
Active objects, which are being added to UML.
Object can have many classifications at the same time and they can change.
Constraints and how to represent them. How to add in constraints and how they interact with state machine. A man can only have one wife.
Differences between objects and agents: different tradition in strong typing area, also in UML signals as the main way for interactions among objects.
Extensions to activity flow diagram. Activity flow is top to bottom and hard to show recursion. Internal states to an agent.
Hiding detail, encapsulation, …
How ontology plays into this
Expansion of CAs (communication acts). Can only two agents can use this.
Context and how to represent it
What happens if meta CA eg if Ask/tell/Inform/ are all defined differently in different worlds.
How do you know what an agent can do? Contracts? Contracts might be extensible. Can I ask an agent if it provides a kind of service (e.g., a registry service) and how to use it? How would this reflectivity work in UML?