The Future of Agent Communication

This short note discusses trends in computing environments where agent communication will have the most value. The main emerging trend in computing is toward openness, that is, toward large systems with dynamically changing, autonomous, heterogeneous components. This trend speaks the end of architecture in the traditional sense. More importantly, it emphasizes on declaratively specified interactions, that is, arms-length relationships, among independent components. Agents and multiagent systems provide key abstractions for computing in open settings. In particular, agent communications will be a key means for structuring distributed computations.