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A minimal infrastructure shell for supporting cooperative agents in heterogeneous distributed environments

As the Internet grows in both physical size as well as social and economic importance it also becomes far more complex and difficult to manage the vast amounts of information present. This has over recent years resulted in an effort to utilise agent technologies to support our human activities in this very complex distributed environment. While the architectural aspects of agents and their operations have received extensive coverage in the literature, much less has been said about fundamental agent infrastructure issues, in particular those parts of infrastructure which are internal to the agent itself. The authors seek to address this imbalance by focussing on the internal agent infrastructure and delineating what constitutes a minimalist infrastructure shell for the support of basic agent operations in distributed heterogeneous environments. In so doing, we examine issues such as locating correspondent agents in networked environments, mechanisms for distributed agent communications (in particular message passing versus RPC or ORBs), and meeting concurrency requirements of inter-agent communications.