Development of Operations Support Mechanism for Wide-Area Distributed Agent Repositories

Abstract

In recent years, programs operating on networks are increasing because of the development of distributed processing technology. Therefore, agent-oriented programming, which can respond dynamically to environmental changes, is receiving attention as a development technique. The agent framework is supports software development through agent-oriented programming. For this research, DASH is a repository type agent framework. A salient feature of DASH is its mechanism, called a repository, which accumulates agents. Moreover, it has the ability to constitute an agent system dynamically using the accumulated agents. Nevertheless, the conventional DASH has a persistent shortcoming. Accumulation of agents who covers all agents is not performed because the agent which each developer developed is accumulated only in a developer's repository. To solve this problem, information is acquired and unified from each repository that exists in a distributed environment. Consequently, we proposes a system that supports the practical use of an agent existing in a broader-based distribution environment. In the operation experiment, we confirm the operation of the search function and the single call function of the agent and increase in the number of available agents by the proposed mechanism.