KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering (정보처리학회논문지:소프트웨어 및 데이터공학)

Korea Information Processing Society (한국정보처리학회)
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A Multi-Agent Message Transport Architecture for Supporting Close Collaboration among Agents

에이전트들 간의 밀접한 협력을 지원하기 위한 다중 에이전트 메시지 전송 구조

  • 장혜진 (상명대학교 소프트웨어공학과)
  • Received : 2013.12.10
  • Accepted : 2014.02.03
  • Published : 2014.03.31
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Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-agent message transport architecture to support application areas which need fast message communications for close collaboration among agents. In the FIPA(Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents) agent platform, all message transfer services among agents are in charge of a conceptual entity named ACC(Agent Communication Channel). In our multi-agent message transport architecture, the ACC is represented as a set of system agents named MTSA(Message Transfer Service Agent). The MTSA enables close collaboration among agents by supporting asynchronous communication, by using Reactor pattern to handle agent input messages efficiently, and by selecting optimal message transfer protocols according to the relative positional relationships of sender agents and receiver agents. The multi-agent framework SMAF(Small Multi-Agent Framework), which is implemented on the proposed multi-agent message transport architecture, shows better performance on message transfer among agents than JADE(Java Agent Development Environment) which is a well-known FIPA-compliant multi-agent framework. The faster the speed of message transfer of a multi-agent architecture becomes, the wider application areas the architecture can support.

본 논문은 에이전트들 간의 긴밀한 협력을 위해 신속한 메시지 통신을 필요로 하는 응용 분야들을 지원하기 위한 다중 에이전트 메시지 전송 구조를 제안한다. 제안하는 구조는 FIPA(Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents) 표준 에이전트 플랫폼 규격에서 에이전트들에게 메시지 전송 서비스를 제공하는 요소인 ACC(Agent Communication Channel)를 MTSA(Message Transfer Service Agent)라는 에이전트들의 집합으로 표현한다. MTSA는 비동기 메시지 통신을 지원하며, 메시지 수신을 효율적으로 처리하기 위해 반응자 패턴(reactor pattern)을 사용하며, 메시지 송신 에이전트와 수신 에이전트의 상대적 위치 관계에 따라 에이전트들 간에 최적의 통신 수단을 선택하여 메시지를 전송하여 에이전트들 간의 긴밀한 협력이 가능하도록 한다. 제안된 메시지 전송 구조에 따라 구현된 다중 에이전트 프레임워크 SMAF(Small Multi-Agent Framework)는 잘 알려진 에이전트 프레임워크 JADE(Java Agent Development Environment)와 비교하였을 때 향상된 메시지 전송 능력을 보인다. 다중 에이전트 구조의 메시지 통신 속도가 고속화되면 될수록 그 다중 에이전트 구조는 더 다양한 응용 분야들에 적용될 수 있을 것이다.

Keywords

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