The OMG Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility

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The OMG Mobile Agent SystemInteroperability
Facility
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Presentation

• Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci
• German National Research Center for Information
  Technology
• (GMD)
• Research Institute for Open Communication Systems
  
• (FOKUS)
• Intelligent Mobile Agent Center of Competence
• (IMA-CC)

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What is MASIF?

• MASIF is the first mobile agent standard of the
  Object Management Group (OMG)
• MASIF
• enables interoperability between agent platforms
  of different vendors
• considers demands capabilities of existing
  agent products
• integrates RPC paradigm and MA technology
• benefits from already existing CORBA standards
• Current participants
• Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The
  Open Group

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MASIF Objective
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MASIF History

• Nov. 1995 - OMG issued RFP3 for a Mobile Agent
  Facility (MAF)
• Several submissions provided during 1996/1997
• Jun. 1997 - Joint submission finished
  (Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The
  Open Group)
• Dec. 1997 - Presentation at OMG Technical
  Meeting, Revision Task Force was set-up

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MASIF History (cont.)

• Feb. 1998 - Successful membership vote,
  Acceptance of MASIF as OMG Technology by the
  Board of Directors
• Mar. 1998 - Acceptance of the final specification
  (ftp//ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/orbos/98-03-09.pdf)

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What to Standardize?
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Model of the Distributed Agent Environment

• Agent Entity which acts autonomously on behalf
  of a person or organization
• Agent System Platform for the execution of
  agents
• Place Context within an agent system in which
  an agent is executed
• Region Set of agent systems with a finder
• Finder Registry for locating agents, places,
  and agent systems

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MASIF Actual StateCurrent Standardization Topics

• Agent management
• Creation/termination, suspension/resumption of
  agents
• Agent tracking
• Localization of agents in a distributed
  environment
• Agent transfer
• Transfer of agent state and classes
• Naming of agents and agent systems
• Standardized syntax and semantics of agent and
  agent system names

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MASIF Actual State (cont.)

• Agent system type and location syntax
• Consideration/integration of common CORBA
  services
• Security, Naming, Life Cycle, Externalization

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MASIF Actual StateThe Distributed Agent
Environment
O R B

• Register agent/place/agent system
• Lookup agent/place/agent/system
• Deregister agent/place/agent system

• Creation, suspension, resumption,
• and termination of agents
• Receive agent
• Fetch class
• Get agent authinfo/agent status
• List agents/places
• Get agent system info/finder
• Find nearby agent system of type

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MASIF Implementations

• Aglets Workbench (IBM)
• MASIF compliance is planned.
• MOA (The Open Group)
• MASIF compliance is planned in the context of the
  ESPRIT research project ANIMA.
• Grasshopper (IKV)
• MASIF compliance was considered from the
  beginning.
• Release 1.1 commercially available now
  (www.ikv.de/products/grasshopper.html).

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MASIF Issues

• Supports different representations of agent state
  tagged by an assigned number
• No standardized internal interfaces (agents can
  be but do not need to be CORBA objects)
• Leaves freedom to implementors, i.e. it covers
  also Java based platforms, but
• Additional agreements between platform
  implementors are necessary to achieve
  interoperability

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MASIF Future Work Issues

• Realization of MASIF compliant implementations
• Test of interoperability
• Development of applications on top of these
  platforms
• Based on experiences made
• Refinements of current standard
• Identification of new issues
• Enhancements of current IDL interfaces

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MASIF Future Work Issues(cont.)

• Based on experiences made (cont.)
• Higher level of interoperability between
  distinguished Java-based agent systems
• serialization format, internal agent system
  capabilities
• security, communication
• Integration of further common CORBA services
  (e.g. Trading Service)
• Co-operation with other standardization bodies
  (FIPA)

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MASIF Future Work Issues(cont.)

• Platform Management

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MASIF Future Work Issues(cont.)

• Platform Management (cont.)

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MASIF Future Work Issues(cont.)

• Platform Management (cont.)Standardized
  Monitoring and Control of local resources, e.g.
• Memory (existing, available)
• CPU (performance, utilization)
• Hardware (devices, states)
• Software (installed, running)
• System (processes, logfiles)
• Network (protocols)

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Summary

• MASIF specification is complete accepted
• Current submission basis for making experiences
  with interoperability of mobile agent platforms
• Additional OMG agent standards will probably
  follow by means of further RFPs
• Tasks
• Realization of MASIF compliant mobile agent
  platforms
• Realization of applications based on MASIF
• Co-operation with other standardization bodies

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MASIF Future Work IssuesExample Trading Service

• Search constraints on properties
• Interface for linking registry of different
  regions