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An infrastructure to support cooperation of knowledge-level agents on the semantic Grid

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Abstract

Can a Knowledge-Level layer be located in the Semantic Grid infrastructure? Is it possible to design an Agent Communication Language (ACL) which enables Knowledge-Level agents to cooperate in a geographically distributed Semantic Grid despite nodes’ failures or malfunctions? This paper tries to address the above Semantic Grid challenges presenting an agent-based Open Service Architecture which integrates geographically distributed agents in a Semantic Grid. The architecture is well integrated with standard Internet components and technologies and supports communication among Knowledge-Level agents. The role of agents is to retrieve, execute and compose available services providing more sophisticated instances of them. Inter-agent communication is realized by exploiting an advanced Agent Communication Language which supports a fault-tolerant anonymous interaction protocol and satisfies a set of well defined Knowledge-Level programming requirements. Here, we present the design of the architecture and of the Agent Communication Language as well as their implementation. The architecture is evaluated by means of several case studies which highlight the main feature of our proposal. The main advantage of our approach is to demonstrate that different issues, such as high level inter-agent communication and fault tolerance, can be successfully integrated in Grid infrastructures which provide Web Services maintaining a clean design of the architecture and a Knowledge-Level characterization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, ITALY

    Nicola Dragoni, Mauro Gaspari & Davide Guidi

Authors
  1. Nicola Dragoni
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  2. Mauro Gaspari
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  3. Davide Guidi
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Additional information

Nicola Dragoni is a research assistant at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna, Italy. He received a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the same University in 2006 with a Thesis on supporting failures in agent communication languages. N. Dragoni’s current research interests are agent communication languages and their verification, fault tolerant design and implementation of coordination protocols in open Multi-Agent Systems, Semantic Web and foundation of actor computation.

Mauro Gaspari is associate professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bologna, Italy. Previoulsy he was at the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa (Italy), at Delphi SpA (Viareggio Italy), and at the Human Cognition Research Laboratory of The Open University (UK). He has carried out research in Artificial Intelligence and Programming Languages for more than twenty years and has published in a number of areas including: declarative programming languages, agent communication languages, concurrent and distributed programming, environment for artificial intelligence, and applications of artificial intelligence. He is a member of ACM and AAAI.

Davide Guidi received his Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Bologna, Italy.

He is mainly interested in the various processes of handling, reusing and exploiting Knowledge in the (Semantic) Web, with particular consideration for Personal Agents. Enthusiast promoter of the open source movement in particular, and of the vision of a free shared knowledge in general, he has worked in several research projects.

He is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Computer Science Department of the University of Bologna, Italy.

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Dragoni, N., Gaspari, M. & Guidi, D. An infrastructure to support cooperation of knowledge-level agents on the semantic Grid. Appl Intell 25, 159–180 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-006-9652-7

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