Ambient Intelligence Through Agile Agents - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 290

Within the context of these specifications, the RTE is organized as a col-
lection of agent platforms . An Agent Platform (AP) provides the basic infras-
tructure that is necessary to deploy agents. Specifically, each AP implements
anumberof platform services, which provide various mandatory and optional
infrastructure services. One platform service is the Agent Management System
(AMS) service. This service is mandatory and is responsible for the creation,
termination, suspension, resumption, registration, deregistration, and execution
of agents that are residing of the AP. A second service is the optional HTTP
Message Transport Service, which provides an HTTP-based message-passing in-
frastructure for the Run-Time Environment. Other services include directory
facilitator services (i.e. yellow pages services), persistence services, migration
services, and cloning services. During the development of agent-oriented appli-
cations, developers are required to identify and implement an appropriate set of
platform services.
Fig. 3. Schematic of the Agent Factory Agent Platform.
In addition to the platform services, the RTE also implements a number
of System Agents. Such System Agents implement a number of infrastructure
services that are needed to support the inter-AP infrastructure. Specifically,
AF currently implements three System Agents. The AMS and DF agents are,
in effect, agent wrappers which envelop the associated AMS and DF platform
services. Both agents control access to the relevant service on the AP. However,
in the context of a multi-AP environment, which is expected for most agent-