Information Technology Reference
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overloading the coordination agent and allows for better structuring of the system
(for maintenance requirements). The analysis of agent models enables the different
business areas of the agents to be distinguished. An agent model is an abstraction of
a type of agent carrying out the same activities. Agents that come from the same
model can be organized according to a hierarchical structure that does not reflect the
physical organization of agents that come out of these models in any way. However,
this hierarchical organization informs as to the activity areas to which the agents
resulting from these models belong.
-Coordination with external applications. Messages exchanged between
external applications and applicative agents transit via the coordination agent. Of
course, transformation of the messages is carried out (by the communication agent,
described hereafter) in order for the messages sent by external applications to be
understood by software agents and vice versa. It is the coordination agent that
distributes messages to the applicative agents concerned and sends the responses
back to the external applications.
- Coordination with the user. Messages exchanged between the user and
applicative agents transit via the coordination stage. The queries of the user are
interpreted by the administration agent (described further on in section 3.4.4) and
then transmitted to the coordination agent that deals with sending the request to the
concerned agent. The transmission of user messages is ensured thanks to the skill
the coordination agent has. This skill provides services enabling administration
queries to be transmitted to a particular agent.
3.4.3. The communication agent
The communication agent enables the translation of queries sent by external
applications into messages comprehensible to the coordination agent and vice versa.
It is broken down into two parts:
- The first part deals with communication with external applications. It uses the
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) [NEW 02] for interaction with external
applications which can be written in any programming language. It provides four
communication primitives ( Ask , Request , Perform and Send ) presented in the form
of Web services [MON04]. The first two primitives enable synchronous
communication and the two others enable asynchronous communication.
- The second part deals with interaction with the coordination agent. It
recuperates messages from communication with the external applications part to
translate them into queries comprehensible to the coordination agent. This part is
provided in the form of an API Java, which can be imported into a Java application
independently of PerSyst.
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