Enhancing Multi-Agent Systems with Peer-to-Peer and Service-Oriented Technologies

Peer-to-peer and service-oriented technologies have emerged as the dominant means for realizing scalable and interoperable distributed applications. This incontrovertible fact seems to nullify the expectation of multi-agent system researchers that agents could play a fundamental role in realizing such applications. However, from a deeper analysis, it is plain that neither peer-to-peer nor service-oriented technologies can provide by themselves the autonomy and social and proactive capabilities of agents. Motivated by such evidence, several research works have been undertaken with the aim of tackling the problem of integrating peer-to-peer and service-oriented technologies with multi-agent systems. This paper deals with this issue as well. In particular, it shows how the JADE software framework can take advantage of two such technologies both for realizing the infrastructure of distributed multi-agent systems and for supporting the interaction with non-agentized systems.