Matchmaking Among Heterogeneous Agents on the Internet

Intelligent Agents in Cyberspace

Volume

Papers from the 1999 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The Internet not only provides data for users to browse, but also databases to query, and software agents to run. Due to the exponential increase of deployed agents on the Internet, automating the search and selection of relevant agents is essential for both users and collaboration among different software agents. This paper first describes the agent capability description language LARKS. Then we will discuss the matchmaking process using LARKS and give a complete working scenario. The paper concludes with comparing our language and the matchmaking process with related works. We have implemented LARKS and the associated powerful matchmaking process, and are currently incorporating it within our RETSINA multiagent framework (Sycara et al. 1996).