An agent development platform

Abstract

Agent computing is a concept that was conceived years ago and recently has been gaining a lot of attention, especially because of the development of the semantic web. Agents can be understood to be computer applications which try to simulate in a realistic way the human society. A virtual society made up of agents that can communicate with each other and are capable of taking decisions on their own behalf. It is envisaged by a number of researchers that the future of computing, ranging from search engines to house hold appliance controllers, will be controlled agents which can automate as vast a range as possible of jobs for us. This dissertation lays out a possible implementation for a platform over which agents can be run and the development of an API which can be used to develop agents for this platform. This dissertation also adopts the use of peer-to-peer networking technologies, in order to enhance the discovery, and messages routing across agent platforms. Peer-to-peer networks are unstable in nature, it is for this reason that one of the objectives of this dissertation is to provide reliable message delivery in such a system. Finally this project was designed in such a way as to allow the migration of agents from one platform to the next at runtime, which gives agents the power of moving them selves dynamically across the network.