Extensible software-based architecture for communication and cooperation within and between communities of distributed agents and distributed objects

A computer readable medium containing a program providing instructions for coordinating communication and cooperative task completion between a community of distributed electronic agents communicating using a dynamically expandable interagent communication language (“ICL”) and at least one other distributed component system communicating using a protocol incompatible with the ICL, said instructions performing the steps of:

• a) receiving by a bridge agent a description of functional capabilities of components of the other distributed component system from a component registry, wherein the component registry is physically independent from the bridge agent;
• b) translating the functional capabilities of components received in step (a) from the protocol of the other distributed computing system into the ICL, to create a translated description;
• c) adding to a facilitator registry of the community of distributed agents the translated description, wherein the facilitator registry is distinct from the component registry;
• and
• d) responsive to a request for service to the community of distributed agents, delegating an ICL sub-goal request to the bridge agent, whereby the bridge agent will translate the ICL sub-goal request into the incompatible protocol of the other distributed component system to create a translated request used to invoke one or more components of the other distributed component system using the translated request.

A software-based flexible computer architecture for communication and cooperative task completion between a community of distributed electronic agents communicating using a dynamically expandable interagent communication language (“ICL”) and at least one other distributed component system, the other distributed component system communicating using a protocol incompatible with the ICL, the computer architecture comprising:

• a plurality of electronic agents capable of communicating in the ICL, at least one of the agents being a bridge agent capable of translating between the ICL and the protocol understood by the other distributed component system, and further capable of translating a description of functional capabilities of components of the other distributed component system registered in a component registry, wherein the component registry is physically independent from the bridge agent;
• and
• a facilitator capable of receiving from the bridge agent, in the ICL format, the translated description of functional capabilities of the components of the other distributed component system and registering the translated description of the functional capabilities in a facilitator registry, the facilitator further capable of receiving a service request in the ICL and in response to the service request, determining a sub-goal request necessary to accomplish the service request, and delegating the sub-goal request, in the ICL, to the bridge agent based upon a match between the sub-goal request and the functional capabilities registered in the facilitator registry, wherein the bridge agent will translate the ICL request into the protocol of the other distributed component system to invoke at least one of the components of the other distributed component system and wherein the component registry is distinct from the facilitator registry.