OPACA: Toward an Open, Language- and Platform-Independent API for Containerized Agents

While multi-agent frameworks can provide many advanced features, they often suffer from not being able to seamlessly interact with the outside world, e.g., with web-services or other multi-agent frameworks. This may be one factor that hinders a broader application of multi-agent systems in production systems. A possible solution to this problem is the combination of multi-agent systems with the concepts of micro-services and containerization, providing language-agnostic open interfaces, as well as encapsulation and modularity. In this paper, we propose an API and reference implementation that can be employed by multi-agent systems based on different languages and frameworks. Each agent component is encapsulated in a container and is accessed through its parent runtime platform, which takes care of aspects such as authentication, input validation, monitoring and other infrastructure tasks. Multiple runtime platforms can then be connected to form systems of distributed, heterogeneous multi-agent societies.