A componentware for distributed agent collaboration

Research into multiagent systems has emerged to formulate open, flexible and scalable solutions to large-scale distributed problems such as WWW information retrieval, data mining and the electronic marketplace. However, the full potential of the multiagent paradigm has yet to be realized, as most major mobile agent frameworks only provide primitive support for inter-agent communication, while the implementation of any collaboration architecture is the system developers' responsibility. For this reason, we introduce a componentware for distributed agent collaboration, CoDAC, to serve as a flexible backbone for collaborative multiagent systems. CoDAC supports and manages dynamic and extendable group membership with high reliability. We describe the architecture and the key features of CoDAC.