Design and Implementation of a Hybrid Agent Platform

This paper presents IMAP, a hybrid agent platform composed of several cooperating intelligent agents and mobile agents. IMAP is implemented in Java and Prolog. Java is used to implement the framework of the system, and in particular for supporting the communication between agents and mobility of agent, while Prolog is used to implement both adduction and derivation mechanisms. IMAP intends to independently employ the underlying derivation/adduction and mobility mechanism. In IMAP, intelligent agent and mobile agent can not only fully exploit individual virtue, but also cooperate to perform a task under a uniform platform. Intelligent agents in IMAP are equipped with hypothetical reasoning capabilities, performed by means of adduction: if the knowledge available to an agent is insufficient to solve a query, the agent could adduce new hypotheses. Each intelligent agent can accept queries from mobile agents by means of the interface module, each query is passed to the reasoning module of intelligent agent which performs a derivation and adduction in order to get an answer for mobile agent. IMAP also provides mobile agents a flexible and efficient coordination mechanism and a reliable migration mechanism, and supports persistence of agent state and agent security. Mobile agent's coordination mechanism exploits the advantages of the XML language and Linda-like coordination. This programmable Linda-like coordination mechanism suits the mobility and openness of the Internet application, XML standard for Internet data representation may guarantee a high-degree of interoperability between heterogeneous environments. The design and implementation key technologies of IMAP are described in this paper. An Internet based auction application example shows the suitability and the effectiveness of the IMAP, and its performance evaluation is also made. Finally, some conclusions and remarks are given.