The OMG Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility

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)

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci What is MASIF? o MASIF is the first mobile agent standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) o MASIF o enables interoperability between agent platforms of different vendors o considers demands & capabilities of existing agent products o integrates RPC paradigm and MA technology o benefits from already existing CORBA standards o Current participants o Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The Open Group

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Objective Agent Platform (Type 3) Agent Platform (Type 4) Agent Platform (Type 1) Agent Platform (Type 2)

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF History o Nov OMG issued RFP3 for a Mobile Agent Facility (MAF) o Several submissions provided during 1996/1997 o Jun Joint submission finished (Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The Open Group) o Dec Presentation at OMG Technical Meeting, Revision Task Force was set-up

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF History (cont.) o Feb Successful membership vote, Acceptance of MASIF as OMG Technology by the Board of Directors o Mar Acceptance of the final specification (ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/orbos/ pdf)

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci What to Standardize?

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci Model of the Distributed Agent Environment o Agent:Entity which acts autonomously on behalf of a person or organization o Agent System:Platform for the execution of agents o Place:Context within an agent system in which an agent is executed o Region:Set of agent systems with a finder o Finder:Registry for locating agents, places, and agent systems

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State Current Standardization Topics o Agent management o Creation/termination, suspension/resumption of agents o Agent tracking o Localization of agents in a distributed environment o Agent transfer o Transfer of agent state and classes o Naming of agents and agent systems o Standardized syntax and semantics of agent and agent system names

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State (cont.) o Agent system type and location syntax o Consideration/integration of common CORBA services o Security, Naming, Life Cycle, Externalization

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State The Distributed Agent Environment IDL Interface MAFAgentSystem O R B MAFAgentSystem Agent Manager MAFFinder Registration Component RPC 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

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Implementations o Aglets Workbench (IBM) o MASIF compliance is planned. o MOA (The Open Group) o MASIF compliance is planned in the context of the ESPRIT research project ANIMA. o Grasshopper (IKV++) o MASIF compliance was considered from the beginning. o Release 1.1 commercially available now (

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Issues o Supports different representations of agent state tagged by an assigned number o No standardized internal interfaces (agents can be but do not need to be CORBA objects) o Leaves freedom to implementors, i.e. it covers also Java based platforms, but o Additional agreements between platform implementors are necessary to achieve interoperability

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues o Realization of MASIF compliant implementations o Test of interoperability o Development of applications on top of these platforms o Based on experiences made: o Refinements of current standard o Identification of new issues o Enhancements of current IDL interfaces

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Based on experiences made (cont.): o Higher level of interoperability between distinguished Java-based agent systems F serialization format, internal agent system capabilities F security, communication o Integration of further common CORBA services (e.g. Trading Service) o Co-operation with other standardization bodies (FIPA)

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management (cont.)

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management (cont.): Standardized Monitoring and Control of local resources, e.g.: o Memory (existing, available) o CPU (performance, utilization) o Hardware (devices, states) o Software (installed, running) o System (processes, logfiles) o Network (protocols) o o o

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci Summary o MASIF specification is complete & accepted o Current submission = basis for making experiences with interoperability of mobile agent platforms o Additional OMG agent standards will probably follow by means of further RFPs o Tasks: o Realization of MASIF compliant mobile agent platforms o Realization of applications based on MASIF o Co-operation with other standardization bodies

OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues Example: Trading Service o Search constraints on properties o Interface for linking registry of different regions Trading Service Agent System Trading Service