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Agent Communication Protocols

There are a variety of interprocess information exchange protocols. In the simplest, one agent acts as a client and sends a query to another agent acting as a server and then waits for a reply, as is shown between agents A and B in Figure . The server's reply might consist of a single answer or a collection or set of answers. In another common case, shown between agents A and C, the server's reply is not the complete answer but a handle which allows the client to ask for the components of the reply, one at a time. A common example of this exchange occurs when a client queries a relational database or a reasoner which produces a sequence of instantiations in response. Although this exchange requires that the server maintain some internal state, the individual transactions are as before -- involving a synchronous communication between the agents. A somewhat different case occurs when the client subscribes to a server's output and an indefinite number of asynchronous replies arrive at irregular intervals, as between agents A and D in Figure . The client does not know when each reply message will be arriving and may be busy performing some other task when they do.

There are other variations of these protocols. Messages might not be addressed to specific hosts, but broadcast to a number of them. The replies, arriving synchronously or asynchronously have to be collated and, optionally, associated with the query that they are replying to.