Practical discovery and lookup of intelligent distributed services

Abstract

Many advanced multi-agent cooperation approaches have been proposed over the years, but few have met the test of widespread adoption and cost effectiveness. Because multi-agent cooperation implies the ability of multiple distributed services to discover and lookup one another, the discovery and lookup services must be based on industry standards for them to be widely adoptable and low in cost to implement. This paper describes the design of a practical and low-cost infrastructure for enabling the dynamic discovery and lookup of intelligent distributed services in a federated heterogeneous network using standard cost-effective Java- and XML- based technologies. The requirements for such dynamic discovery and lookup protocols will first be described. An overview of those core candidate solution technologies will then be presented. A dynamic discovery and lookup design based on standard Java and XML technologies will then be described in terms of both the discovery and lookup service infrastructure and client interfaces to such infrastructure.