Expressing Quality of Service in Agent Communication

An agent communication language ACL provides a mechanism for agents to express their desires and intentions to other agents in a content language independent manner. Agents can converse about what they know and what they want to know from other agents. This sharing of information allows multiple agents to work together to meet common goals as well as individual goals. However, in some applications, it is not enough for one agent to let another agent know that it wants some information. A requesting agent must also be able to express something about how it wants the information to be delivered. In general, it is important for an agent to be able to express a desired quality of service QoS as part of a communication with another agent. Further, it also is necessary for agents to be able to express the level of quality that it can provide to other agents in the services that it can offer. In this paper, the authors present a methodology for expressing QoS in the capabilities of agents and in the requirements of agents. Section 2 defines the semantics of QoS in agent communication by extending the semantics of a well-known communication language Knowledge Query Manipulation Language KQML. Section 3 presents extensions to KQML that allow for the expression of QoS in the language. Section 4 briefly describes a prototype that they have implemented to demonstrate the use of these language extensions. Section 5 concludes with a summary and discussion of the applicability of their work.