1. The OMG Mobile Agent System Interoperability Facility

2. Presentation Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) Research Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS) Intelligent Mobile Agent Center of Competence (IMA-CC)

3. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci What is MASIF? o MASIF is the first mobile agent standard of the Object Management Group (OMG) o MASIF o enables interoperability between agent platforms of different vendors o considers demands & capabilities of existing agent products o integrates RPC paradigm and MA technology o benefits from already existing CORBA standards o Current participants o Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The Open Group

4. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Objective Agent Platform (Type 3) Agent Platform (Type 4) Agent Platform (Type 1) Agent Platform (Type 2)

5. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF History o Nov. 1995 - OMG issued RFP3 for a Mobile Agent Facility (MAF) o Several submissions provided during 1996/1997 o Jun. 1997 - Joint submission finished (Crystaliz, General Magic, GMD FOKUS, IBM, The Open Group) o Dec. 1997 - Presentation at OMG Technical Meeting, Revision Task Force was set-up

6. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF History (cont.) o Feb. 1998 - Successful membership vote, Acceptance of MASIF as OMG Technology by the Board of Directors o Mar. 1998 - Acceptance of the final specification (ftp://ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/orbos/98-03- 09.pdf)

7. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci What to Standardize?

8. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci Model of the Distributed Agent Environment o Agent:Entity which acts autonomously on behalf of a person or organization o Agent System:Platform for the execution of agents o Place:Context within an agent system in which an agent is executed o Region:Set of agent systems with a finder o Finder:Registry for locating agents, places, and agent systems

9. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State Current Standardization Topics o Agent management o Creation/termination, suspension/resumption of agents o Agent tracking o Localization of agents in a distributed environment o Agent transfer o Transfer of agent state and classes o Naming of agents and agent systems o Standardized syntax and semantics of agent and agent system names

10. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State (cont.) o Agent system type and location syntax o Consideration/integration of common CORBA services o Security, Naming, Life Cycle, Externalization

11. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Actual State The Distributed Agent Environment IDL Interface MAFAgentSystem O R B MAFAgentSystem Agent Manager MAFFinder Registration Component RPC Register agent/place/agent system Lookup agent/place/agent/system Deregister agent/place/agent system Creation, suspension, resumption, and termination of agents Receive agent Fetch class Get agent authinfo/agent status List agents/places Get agent system info/finder Find nearby agent system of type

12. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Implementations o Aglets Workbench (IBM) o MASIF compliance is planned. o MOA (The Open Group) o MASIF compliance is planned in the context of the ESPRIT research project ANIMA. o Grasshopper (IKV++) o MASIF compliance was considered from the beginning. o Release 1.1 commercially available now (www.ikv.de/products/grasshopper.html).

13. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Issues o Supports different representations of agent state tagged by an assigned number o No standardized internal interfaces (agents can be but do not need to be CORBA objects) o Leaves freedom to implementors, i.e. it covers also Java based platforms, but o Additional agreements between platform implementors are necessary to achieve interoperability

14. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues o Realization of MASIF compliant implementations o Test of interoperability o Development of applications on top of these platforms o Based on experiences made: o Refinements of current standard o Identification of new issues o Enhancements of current IDL interfaces

15. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Based on experiences made (cont.): o Higher level of interoperability between distinguished Java-based agent systems F serialization format, internal agent system capabilities F security, communication o Integration of further common CORBA services (e.g. Trading Service) o Co-operation with other standardization bodies (FIPA)

16. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management

17. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management (cont.)

18. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues (cont.) o Platform Management (cont.): Standardized Monitoring and Control of local resources, e.g.: o Memory (existing, available) o CPU (performance, utilization) o Hardware (devices, states) o Software (installed, running) o System (processes, logfiles) o Network (protocols) o o o

19. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci Summary o MASIF specification is complete & accepted o Current submission = basis for making experiences with interoperability of mobile agent platforms o Additional OMG agent standards will probably follow by means of further RFPs o Tasks: o Realization of MASIF compliant mobile agent platforms o Realization of applications based on MASIF o Co-operation with other standardization bodies

20. OMG Technical Meeting Electronic Commerce DTF September 1998 Seattle Dr.-Ing. Stefan Covaci MASIF Future Work Issues Example: Trading Service o Search constraints on properties o Interface for linking registry of different regions Trading Service Agent System Trading Service