SAGE-LITE: An Intelligent Light-Weight Multi-agent System

The contemporary expansion of software platforms for handheld devices, such as J2ME, has broadened application perspectives in this area. It is becoming more and more popular around the globe. Escalation in the use of lightweight devices and PDA's leads us to create a solid base for future nomadic applications, positioned in a changing environment. Intelligent agents are the program that carry out tasks on behalf of the user and apply some degree of intelligence to the tasks by interacting with other agents. The intelligence may be pretty minimal but often will include some degree of learning from past experience. SAGE-LITE is a lightweight context aware multi-agent system which senses the capabilities of the lightweight devices and reacts accordingly. It enhances the capabilities of an existing system - SAGE - and makes it compatible with a vast variety of currently available lightweight devices through its intelligent agents. When agents supporting nomadic users are developed, optimization of agent communication for wireless environment is one of the key issues. This paper addresses the issues of wireless environment and gives the detailed design of context-aware light-weight multi-agent system. The system has the ability to sense the capabilities of the devices in the given context and react accordingly. As the system is based on the latest FIPA specifications, agent uses the FIPA-ACL for communication and bit-efficient protocol for encoding and decoding of ACL message