Naming Services in Multi-Agent Systems: A Design for Agent-Based White Pages

Distributed multi-agent systems require naming services to locate and communicate with remote agents. In this paper we focus on the design and implementation of the “White Pages,” which maps names to addresses, as a separate naming service from directory and discovery services. We present a unified agent-based white pages architecture that is integrated with the communication and security mechanisms of the underlying agent framework, thereby inheriting all of their customized properties. The design is scalable, robust to failure and loss of persisted data, and supports mobile agents. Using the open source Cougaar agent architecture as our base example, we present experimental results for an agent society of more than 1000 agents running on more than 100 hosts.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Todd Wright
• Keywords: ATAL 2004, Cougaar Agent Architecture, Naming Service, White Pages