Improvements of the Platform

The platform provides in its current state a good base for future work, especially through its extension mechanism. But there are also some features missing.

Two things to be done which are somewhat similar are places and Agent groups. Both are used for dividing Agents into different groups which are based on the Agent and the field of work it is doing. The places should be used for Agents accessing the same resources and doing similar tasks. The Agents could be given then the possibility to communicate between them and processing their tasks in a team. Some work is better done by a group of Agents as of one alone. This goes into the field of artificial intelligence and could be implemented when providing services for intelligent Agents in future. The same is valid for Agent groups. Agent groups are used for sending multicast messages, which is not implemented in this version for this reason. Agent groups would have to be defined independently of the Systems they are residing. This leads to a implementation of them in the MAFFinder. Perhaps this will be added later to the standard or would have to be added as a addition to the standard MAFFinder in a TAgents proprietary way.

Beside of developing new service providing System Agent, the administration utilities, especially the GUIAdmin, have to be improved. The GUIAdmin like existing in the actual version is just the start of a good GUI to administrate the System or in future any amount of Systems in a region. This could be done by implementing the MAFAgentSystem standard which provides methods for controlling System over CORBA. By using this standard it would be possible for an administration tool to maintain other Systems (beside TAgents) as well. This was one of the targets of the OMG when defining the standard. On the other side a third party administration utility could be used as well to maintain TAgents Systems.