Agility: Agent - ility architecture final report, Jun. 1998-Jun 2002

Today's agent systems are monolithic, centralized, and do not provide a clear migration path for integration with mainstream technologies (e.g., object and web technologies). The objective of the Agility project is to develop an open agent grid architecture populated with scalable, deployable, industrial strength agent grid components, targeting the theme 'agents for the masses.' The overall technical approach has been to deconstruct agent systems into components, then populate an open agent grid architecture with scalable light-weight agent grid components that are engineered to piggyback on existing and emerging standards (e.g., distributed objects, email, web, search engines, XML, Java, Jini). Three agent system components resulted from this work: a light-weight agent system that uses email for message transport (eGents), a constrained natural language interface system that can wrap agents and other Internet resources and operate over the web (AgentGram), a yellow pages service that uses Internet search engines to locate XML ads for agents and other Internet resources (WebTrader).