An Open Interaction Framework for Communicative Agents

The main objective of this project is to define a structure that allows the interaction and communication between artificial agents in an open, heterogeneous, and distributed system.

A system is considered as “open” when its components are not rigidly predetermined but can enter and exit dynamically from the system, “heterogeneous” means that these components are developed independently by several designers having different necessities, whereas it is “distributed” when its components are programs operating on different computers. In the past few years, this research theme has become more and more interesting, due to the constant growth of the internet, which simplifies the creation of distributed and heterogeneous systems and could benefit from the possibility to develop open systems for the applications of e-commerce, data search, and other types of services. The creation of standards for the development of such systems is highly complex and requires, in particular, the definition of:

• an agent communication language,
• the context of the interaction,
• shared concepts and rules,
• protocols for agent interaction.