A CORBA-based multi-agent system integration framework

This paper presents a CORBA-based multi-agent system (CBMAS) for integrating geographically dispersed, distributed and heterogeneous enterprises/organizations and internal application systems of an enterprise/organization. CBMAS supports communication and interoperation between distributed systems both at application level and at semantic and knowledge levels. It offers mechanisms and tools to encapsulate agents into CORBA application objects, wrap legacy systems, share heterogeneous databases and locate agents. Some of the key components of the CBMAS, including an agent reference model, a type of distributed multi-agent system based-on the concept of intelligent deputy, CORBA-oriented software architecture for agent, and Web-based application architecture of the CBMAS are proposed and discussed. A conceptual prototype system has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of CBMAS.