Agentcities Interaction Using the Opal Platform

The Agentcities network provides an opportunity to test the interoperation of multi-agent systems that are distributed and implemented across a variety of platforms whose only common factor is adherence to the FIPA protocols. In this context we aim to test our agent platform, Opal, which employs some new techniques for agent information exchange that we believe can make agent interaction in heterogeneous environments such as Agentcities more effective. The new agent interaction techniques supported by Opal involve (a) ontology and ontology-specific content language representation in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and (b) dynamic exchange of interaction protocols. We will be testing the Opal system in the areas of tourism and distributed healthcare, both of which are significant application areas in New Zealand.