Enabling Peer-to-Peer Resource Discovery in Agent Environment

Abstract

Negotiation, co-operation and collaboration between muti-agents systems is the key to success in the agent world. An agent that is capable of these actions can offer them as services. the main challenge lies in discovering the agents that provides and services. FIPA architecture facilitates service discovery process with the help of Directory Facilitator (DF), but the service discovery process is limited to a particular Agent Platform. Federation between the DFs would lead to a Gnutella type peer-to-peer network, which is neither scalable nor efficient. In this paper we propose modifications to existing Directory Facilitator to enhance the global service discover among the agent platform. We propose a scalable architecture, which forms decentralized clusters of Directory Facilitators. These clusters are self-governing, fault-tolerant and support global service discovery. We also discuss ways of improving the performance of the service discovery process using the architecture.