AgentSystemID

Every System has to be able to be addressed with an unique ID. To provide a net wide unique identifier TAgents uses a constellation of the ip number of the machine where the System is running and a name which is unique on this machine. These two identifiers combined produce a good and unique ID for the System. Normally the ID is represented as a string in the form of ip-number + ``/'' + name. It is the responsibility of the administrator to choose different names for more Agent Systems running on the same machine. In fact the System terminates with an error when already another Agent System is registered with the same ID in the MAFFinder (region registry).

The AgentSystemID as well as the AgentID are not the same as the Name object used by the MASIF standard. But they provide methods to convert them to each other in both directions. The basic ID as described above is usable as key for the ID objects as well as for the Name object. The main differences are that the ID objects (AgentID and AgentSystemID) both provide a Authority entity. It could be decided in the future to just use the Name object especially when making the Agent System complaint to the MAFAgentSystem standard. You would then have to provide the Authority as an extra parameter when necessary.