A Component-Based Approach for Interoperability across FIPA-Compliant Platforms

Software Agents are becoming one of the most important approaches for developing open distributed systems. Interoperability is a critical issue to develop open and flexible agent-based applications, as it would make reusability possible across heterogeneous agent systems. Agent interoperability can be achieved through the use of FIPA standardized specifications. Although most major FIPA-compliant platforms have reached a consensus on the different alternative specifications to interoperate, for other platforms this would remain an open issue. For the latter cases FIPA suggests the use of gateways, but sometimes it is not possible to extend or provide the basic gateway for all cases. This paper presents an approach for developing heterogeneous agent-based systems regardless of the FIPA-compliant agent platforms involved. The basis of our proposal is the use of component technology for the development of adaptive software agents. Our compositional software agent separates the distribution of messages according to different transport services, which reduces platform dependency on the agent coordinated behaviour. This agent capability allows using these agents as gateways between agent platforms, providing an immediate solution to interoperability.