Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Typed Natural
Language
Processor
(mnemonics
dictionary)
System Services Agent
(Agents' name server,
Status monitoring,
Agent Migration
Support, etc.)
Coordinator for
Modular Power
Subsystem
Report
Generation
Agents
Remote
Client
Coordinator for
Modular Power
Subsystem
Monitoring Agents
1
Interface
Services
Agent
4
14
2
3
5
Results
Management
Agent
Mnemonics
Specialist
User Interface
Web Client or GUI
Data
Server
6
Solar Array
Reporting
Specialist
Agent
1
11
10
Battery
Reporting
Specialist
Agent
Schema
Builder
User Modeling
Agent
Agent Builder
9
12
7
13
8
KEY
Specialist Agent -
A CLIPS Process
Agent Communication Bus
Fig. 4.3.
AFLOAT architecture definition
The architecture provided two classes of specialist agents - coordinator
specialist and regular specialist. The coordinator specialist handled complex
requests requiring the participation of three or more regular specialist agents
to process. The coordinator agent had access to the system's global skill-
base and possessed the capability to assemble a group of specialist agents,
decompose the request into smaller tasks, and delegate the requests to them.
Upon completing their tasks, the specialist agents returned their results to
the coordinator, which in turn assembled them and freed up members of the
agent group to return to their original states. Each specialist agent also had
the capability to collaborate with other agents to process a task.
After accepting a request, a specialist agent examined it to determine
whether it would require the services of other agents. If another agent's skill
was required to support the task, it sent a message to the SSA requesting the
location of the agent. After receiving a response from SSA, it formulated a
request and sent a message to the other specialist agent. The other specialist
agent would process the task and return a response (result) to the specialist
agent. Each agent depicted in Fig.
4.3
existed in a C-language Integrated Pro-
duction System (CLIPS) [
46
] process with a persistent socket connection to
the SSA for monitoring its health and safety.
Approaches for Addressing Multiagent Architectural Issues
in AFLOAT
To successfully develop AFLOAT as a MAS, the following four architectural
issues had to be addressed:
•
An approach was established for describing and decomposing the tasks
that gave the coordinator specialist agents and regular specialist agents
the capability to describe and decompose tasks.
