Towards a real-time agent architecture-a whitepaper

Applications such as military training simulations and electronic commerce can benefit from the flexible and responsive nature of multi-agent systems. These applications have inherent timing constraints on the operations and interactions that the agents might perform. This paper presents a real-time agent architecture in which agents communicate, cooperate, coordinate and negotiate to meet the goals of a particular application under specified timing constraints. The architecture provides a real-time CORBA layer to handle the underlying real-time communication. It also has a real-time agent communication layer in which agents interact via a real-time extension of a well-known agent communication language.