Agent platform-based directory facilitator for efficient service discovery

Today, multi-agent technologies are important in realizing upcoming ubiquitous environment, in which service discovery is a critical task for finding a particular service instance. While JADE is the most popular system for multi-agent applications, its directory facilitator (DF) employs the sequential search method causing inefficiency in various aspects. This paper proposes a new DF scheme which is registered as an agent and employs category database. The DFs are compared with regards to query response time and memory space requirement using the test agent we implemented. The results demonstrate that the proposed DF requires much smaller memory space requirement and allows faster query processing than JADE-DF, especially for large number of services and queries of multiple parameters.