Facilitators: A Networked Computing Infrastructure for Distributed Software Interoperation

Facilitators1 provides an infrastructure a collection of networked task-independent system programs supporting automated interoperation between distributed heterogeneous software agents. Through a flexible communication model, the Facilitators infrastructure provides a variety of services to heterogeneous software agents based on both request/reply and publish/subscribe protocols, the communication of knowledge about agents’ capabilities and interests, and the semantic translation between different information models. The underlying communication language is based on first-order logic, which supports automated reasoning. The Facilitators infrastructure has been used in several projects requiring interoperation among distributed software applications. This paper describes the interoperation model, architecture, and operation supported by Facilitators. It then discusses the underlying communication language and illustrates automated interoperation through examples. The paper concludes with a discussion of related research and an outline of future directions.