An Architecture for Smart Internet Agents

Considerable work has been done in the area of agents and agent technology in the past few years. The agent metaphor has been applied, with varying degrees of success, to a variety of situations from personal assistants to distributed problem solving. This paper describes a system designed to support agents on the lntemet and addresses some basic issues dealing with network agents: Agent transport, agent security, and agent locator services. While work has already been done on these three issues, in most cases the existing systems and solutions do not address or scale well to the requirements of a large-scale, uncontrolled network such as the Interact. This paper explores transport and security issues for agents on the lntemet as well as an innovative approach that uses the World-Wide-Web as a distributed knowledge base to help agents find other agents.