Design of an agent cluster as integrative environment of personal agents

Since searching, sorting and filtering of information is becoming more and more important, the demand for supportive autonomous, mobile and intelligent software agents is steadily increasing. For fast and efficient implementation of agents there needs to be a powerful infrastructure supporting collaboration and coordination between agents. While developing such a powerful distributed infrastructure for personal agents in Java, we combine all personal agents of one user within a so called agent cluster which may be seen as an integrative environment. Agents can easily enter or leave the cluster or run within a common security environment separated from the outside. Within the cluster they use common private services such as access to private data, serialization or efficient communication services. The design of such a cluster composed of a software bus called agent bus and agents is described in this paper. For agents, we introduce a flexible design of an agent model by identifying different inter-agent functionality with specific agent roles.