The Agentis Agent Interaction Model

• Authors: David Kinny
• Venue: ATAL '98 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents V, Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages
• Year: 1998

Agentis is a framework for the implementation of commercial, interactive, process-driven application systems, and is based upon an underlying agent technology (presently dMARS) that provides core agent functionality. These systems are intended to be programmed by the business process owner - application functionality is defined by a set of procedure and data definitions in an abstract process description language called GEM, and the framework is designed to allow these specifications to be easily modified and extended by their owner after the system has been implemented and commissioned. The tool set that supports the specification process has an industry-standard look-and-feel and is designed to be intuitive to non-technical users such as business analysts. Its use is supported by a methodology that guides specification refinement, helping to take agent-oriented programming out of the research lab and into the world of commerce and industry. The Agentis framework provides structure and functionality not provided by the underlying dMARS system. Key conceptual components are an agent model that defines standard agent types, and an agent interaction model based on explicit notions of services and tasks, a strictly typed agent communication language, a set of protocols that provide reliable, concurrent provision of services and tasks, and conventions for structuring agents into a hierarchy and controlling their activity. Concrete components are built-in agents that provide services for system management and monitoring, and standard interfaces that facilitate the integration of the Agentis systemwith other systemcomponents such asmiddleware, databases, user interfaces,web browsers and servers, and legacy systems. In a companion paper to this one,we have described and formally specified the interaction protocols that are a key element of the interaction model [3]. In this paper we motivate and present the design of the Agentis interaction model and describe its functionality.