Object Services and Consulting, Inc.

  Agility: Agent -Ility Architecture

DARPA Contract No. F30602-98-C-0159  AO J357
Contract Duration:  18 June 1998 - 17 June 2002

This research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and managed by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under contract F30602-98-C-0159. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, or the United States Government.


Project Overview -The objective of the DARPA/CoABS Agility project is to develop a light-weight agent grid architecture and implementation that is scalable and pervasive by virtue of piggybacking on existing and emerging standards (e.g., email, web, search engines, Java, Jini, xml, distributed objects).  Agility grid components should be separately useful but also composable and interoperable with GITI grid components.
  • FY01 Annual Report
  • Current Presentation Material:
  • CoABS Workshop Presentation (office 2000 ppt - 2.3MB), Nashua NH, July 23-25, 2001
  • Agility Project Presentation Updated (office 2000 ppt - 4.8MB), July 19, 2001
  • CoAX TIE avi (.exe includes TechSmith TSCC Codec and viewer - 4.2MB), July 19, 2001
  • JBI TIE avi - short version (.exe includes TechSmith TSCC Codec and viewer - 2.9MB - 2:14 min), July 19, 2001
  • Recent  Presentation Material:
  • Agility Poster  (html, ppt-227kb) and presentation (html, ppt-4056kb) for CoABS Workshop, Miami, FL, January 31-Feb 2 2001 (workshop page)
  • Older Presentation:  Agility Project Progress, presented at CoABS Workshop, Boston, MA, August 9-11, 2000
  • Older Presentation:  Agility Poster, Craig Thompson, presented at CoABS Atlanta Workshop, Atlanta, GA, February 15-17, 2000
  • Homepage:  Agility Project Description at GITI CoABS Public Homepage
  • Workshop Paper:  Agents for the Masses (.doc), Thompson, Bannon, Pazandak, and Vasudevan, invited paper, Agent 99 Workshop on Agent-Based High Performance Computing: Problem Solving Applications And Practical Deployment, Seattle, May 1 1999.
    • Agility Grid Component Prototypes
  • eGent Email Agent Prototype - eGent provides a scalable way to send (FIPA or KQML) ACL messages encoded in XML by email, providing a light-weight agent platform that inherits many benefits from email:  pervasiveness, disconnected messaging, security, firewall access, mobile users, logging, visualization.  Any agent can offer services to any other using this architecture.
  • WebTrader and DeepSearch Prototypes - Webtrader is a trader which relies on web-based search engines to locate advertisements (want ads, classifieds) represented in XML that reside on web pages anywhere on the web.  The architecture is scalable by virtue of web search engines and federation is supported by means of advertisements for other webtraders and search engines.
  • Menu-based Natural Language Interface (MBNLI) and AgentGram Prototypes - Using MBNLI, end users select words and phrases from menus to construct sentences the system will understand - this takes the guess work out of NLI technology.  AgentGram uses MBNLI and dynamically loaded grammars attached to agents to permit complex queries that may involve knowledge of several agents and provides a way for humans to task agents and for agents to communicate with each other.
  • Agility Grid - One of the main objectives of our work in FY00 is to integrate the Agility components together with the GITI Jini grid implementation and make them Web-ready.
    • Architecture- Our architecture work has been focused on
  • characterizing the agent grid - Our paper on "Characterizing the Agent Grid" establishes a firm connection to related work on grids, describes several useful views of the grid architecture, and identifies many of the open issues.
  • providing a strawman agent reference architectureto describe the CoABS work to others in DARPA/DoD and to standards development organizations.
  • technical notes that illuminate agent architectural issues
    • Tech Transfer - Our approach to transfering Agility technology is to develop and fan out prototypes, participate in the CoABS NEO TIEs and affinity groups and in related DARPA ISO efforts (e.g., ALP and ISO Architecture Working Group) to insure our CoABS architecture ideas and implementations are transferred to others in DoD, lead in industry standards areas related to agents, and publish papers that describe our work.
  • DARPA
  • Standards - One of the ways to make CoABS and agent technology pervasive is to work through leading standard organizations.  Our approach is to lead and not follow, transferring our work to standards groups as it is informed by our implementation experience.
    • © Copyright 1998, 1999, 2000 Object Services and Consulting, Inc. Permission is granted to copy this document provided this copyright statement is retained in all copies. Disclaimer: OBJS does not warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information in this survey.

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