eGents: Agents over Email
- Thesis: Integration of agent technology with pervasive Web-ORB-Email backplanes is a route to making agent technology open, pervasive and robust.
- eGents are agents which communicate over email. eGents use FIPA or KQML Agent Communication Language (ACL) encoded in XML. No ACL parser needed.
- Status: Prototype, NEO demo, gridified, on wireless Palm.
- In progress: packaging and various extensions
- Dynamic military situations are often disconnected and asynchronous.
- Need a scalable way to deliver agent messages to 1000’s of platforms.
- Agent systems are often closed and require a lot of specialized agent technology.
- Anyone with email can create an agent service that anyone else can use.
- eGents leverages pervasive, robust email infrastructure, inherits support for disconnected operations, message queueing, mobile users, firewalls, filtering, logging, and security.
- eGents spec submitted to FIPA standards group.
In one eGents application, each NEO evacuee has
a Personal Status Monitor, which measures location, vital signs, etc.
The PSM contains an eGent which intermittently communicates to
subscribing entities using email protocols.