Interoperability between KODAMA and JADE using Agent Platform Protocol

Due to the spread of distributed systems, a number of agent systems have been developed. Since most existing multiagent systems implement different agent platforms (AP), it is extremely hard to get heterogeneous agents to work together. In this paper, we introduce a new network protocol called Agent Platform Protocol (APP), which is designed to meet the exact demands of agent interaction over world-wide networks. The most significant contribution of this protocol is that it supports peer-to-peer (P2P) communication among agent platforms and hides the network-level implementation details from agents. To demonstrate its usefulness, APP has been used to realize the interaction between independent agent systems from two projects, JADE and KODAMA. JADE is an agent system in compliance with the FIPA specifications, and KODAMA is an agent system one being developed in our laboratory. The experimental results show that APP can help JADE and KODAMA agents to communicate with each other without the agents being aware of the difference in their agent platforms.