SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004 1541-1672/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE 71Published by the IEEE Computer Society

Editor: Alun PreeceUniversity of Aberdeenapreece@csd.abdn.ac.uk

G l o b a l I S

Of course, the science-fiction-like vision of an Internetpopulated by intelligent systems is still some way off. How-ever, new technologies such as Web services, the SemanticWeb, Grid computing, and peer-to-peer networks havemade it easier than ever to create intelligent applicationsthat span not only multiple machines but also multiple sitesand organizations. So, one great challenge in intelligentsystems research is to harness these technologies to verifyand apply longstanding theories from distributed AI, agentsystems, and other areas of networked intelligent systemsresearch. Although we can generate knowledge from mod-els, simulations, and small-scale trials, gaining a thoroughunderstanding of intelligent systems requires increasinglylarge-scale deployments in challenging environments.

Unfortunately, such experimentation is time consumingand costly—often requiring significant infrastructure devel-opment, maintenance, and low-level implementation beforewe can tackle more challenging and innovative elements. Asthe environments in which we employ intelligent systemscontinue to grow, so do the costs of deploying, testing, andverifying such systems.

The Agentcities test bedIn mid 2000, numerous research groups—including ones

from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne,Motorola Laboratories in Paris, and Fujitsu Laboratories ofAmerica—set up the Agentcities test bed to create a shared

global test-bed environment specifically for intelligent appli-cations that span multiple sites and organizations (see www.agentcities.org). The test bed was based on agent technol-ogy—in particular, on the Foundation for Intelligent PhysicalAgents standard (www.fipa.org). FIPA provides a compre-hensive set of specifications from messaging and directories,through system management, up to well-formed semanticcommunication languages for agents.

The first-generation test bed became the biggest deploy-ment of FIPA agent platforms to date (and thereby possiblyone of the biggest global deployments of intelligent sys-tems), with over 150 deployed platforms in 30 countries andmore than 100 participating organizations (see Figure 1).Organizations deploying agents included between 15 and 20implementations of the required FIPA standards—includinga significant selection of open-source toolkits. Participantsworked on applications ranging from large demonstrationsthat included several hundred agents spanning three conti-nents to more modest deployments of marketplaces, demon-stration healthcare systems, infrastructure services (such asdirectories, oncology services, or matchmakers), and more.

A metaphor for building intelligentsystems

Researchers have long viewed agent technology1 as apotential metaphor for building distributed intelligent sys-tems. However, open distributed environments such as thepublic Internet are where agent concepts really come tothe fore, because applications must deal with

• Many intelligent systems belonging to diverse applica-tions that can’t be directly controlled or analyzed

• Competitive rather than cooperative environments (notall actors have the same goals)

• Legal issues of responsibility

The technologies used in Agentcities might not be thefirst choice for production systems (many platforms areprototype environments and not ready for mission-criticalapplications). However, agent notions of autonomy, ex-plicit communication semantics, and social contexts (social

Intelligent systems are rarely deployed in isolation. Fur-

thermore, with the advent of the global Internet, corpo-

rate intranets, and the Web, the potential for interactions

between intelligent systems has never been greater.

Deploying Intelligent Systems on a Global Scale

Steven Willmott, Unviersitat Politecnica de Catalunya

In this issue, Global IS moves away from covering a single regionand instead focuses on a large-scale collaborative effort betweenresearch communities around the world. —Alun Preece

Editor’s Perspective

rules, obligations, commitments, and otherdeontic relationships) seem likely to be-come increasingly important in large-scalesystems deployment.

In July 2003, Agentcities contributors usedthe first-generation test bed to implementone of the largest agent application demon-strations to date. The demonstration featuredthe dynamic discovery and composition of

services provided by nearly 200 individualagents deployed live on 14 different servershosted in various European countries, Japan,and the US.2 The scenario included 25 differ-ent service types ranging from simple infor-mation providers, to marketplaces and auctionfacilities, to personal user representatives andsimple planners. These service types workedtogether in interlinked small-business service

composition and personalized evening-planning scenarios.

Like the similarly scaled DARPA CoAX-TIE (Coalition Agents Experiment Technol-ogy Integration Experiment) military de-monstration carried out over the DARPA Gridin 2002, the Agentcities.RTD applicationclearly demonstrates the benefit of a sharedeffort for infrastructure development. Re-searchers today often still must build suchinfrastructures from scratch, but increas-ingly flexible generations of technologiessuch as Web Services and Semantic Weblanguages will make it possible to deployjoint test beds and share infrastructure-levelactivities. Then we’ll be able to focus onhigher-level issues while slowly maturinglower-level technologies to the point wherethey can function “out of the box.”

openNetAlthough the first-generation Agentcities

project has ended, deployment efforts con-tinue in the new openNet initiative (http://x-opennet.net). openNet is extending theAgentcities technology base to make it moreflexible, decentralize it, and include tech-nologies from new generations of standardssuch as Web Services and the Semantic Web.

72 www.computer.org/intelligent IEEE INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

Figure 1. The Agentcities test bed’s wide deployment of FIPA (Foundation for IntelligentPhysical Agents) agent platforms (from April 2000 to March 2004). Each dot representsa registered network node hosted by a participating organization—white nodes representing those up and actively providing services when the snapshot was taken.

Several projects around the world are contributing to cur-rent activities in Agentcities and openNet.

Spain Agentcities.ES (http://grusma2.etse.urv.es/AgCitES/) is the Span-

ish Agent Technology Research Network. The network providessupport for agent technology development and deployment inSpain through events, working groups, and support for inter-change between industry and academic organizations workingin the field.

UK The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

funds Agentcities.UK (http://agentcitiesuk.net), which orga-nizes a series of “challenge days” that encourage hands-onuse of agent technologies to specific application areas.The project also provides support for research coordinationbetween UK academic partners working the agent technol-ogy field.

Latin AmericaThe @list Technology Net Project, funded by the EuropeAid

@lis program, provides a variety of infrastructure, teaching,and demonstration platforms in Latin American countries

including Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Mexico (see www.alis-technet.org/index.php).

Italy In Italy, the Anemone is a national project (coordinated by

the University of Parma) on agent-based sharing of learningobjects (course components) between teachers and students atfive Italian universities.

Australia RMIT University leads a collaboration activity called “Descrip-

tion, Composition, Discovery, and Deployment of IntelligentAgent Services.” It’s funded by the Australian government, andthe goal is to work with European initiatives in the area ofadvanced business network technologies and tourism. It’s cur-rently collaborating with the European Commission FP6-fundedSatine project and contributing to openNet. (Contact idm@cs.rmit.edu.au for more information.)

GermanyIn Germany, Agent.Enterprise and Agent.Hospital are large-

scale demonstration systems under development. The GermanResearch Foundation DFG is funding these projects as part ofthe Agent Priority Program SPP1083 (see www.realagents.org).

Actively Contributing Projects

The openNet test bed’s long-term goal isto continue providing a useful open testenvironment that lets different research anddevelopment projects share the same infra-structure by

• Introducing an increasingly diverse mixof technologies and applications

• Increasing the maturity of the technolo-gies involved

• Increasing our understanding of deploy-ing large-scale open systems

This development is being accompaniedby an open-source effort to produce BSD-licensed Java infrastructure components thatcan help support both the existing test bedand future extensions (for more information,visit http://opennet-srv.sourceforge.net). Tojoin openNet’s email discussion forum, emaildiscussion@x-opennet.org.

Whether through Agentcities, open-Net, or other initiatives (see the sidebar),new generations of technologies are pro-viding unprecedented opportunities fordeploying interconnected intelligent sys-tems and creating larger-scale applications.The hope is that global initiatives will helpdefray investment costs in infrastructure,spread best practices, and reduce duplica-tion of effort—making it possible for moregroups to experiment at larger scales.

AcknowledgmentsI thank everyone who contributed to the Agent-

cities initiative and to openNet. In particular, Ithank the various funding agencies supportingthe work described here.

References

1. M. Luck, P. McBurney, and C. Preist, AgentlinkAgent Technology Roadmap,Agentlink, 2001;www.agentlink.org/roadmap.

2. S. Willmott et al., Agentcities.RTD EuropeanProject Dynamic Service Composition De-monstration, tech. report 00001, Agentcities,2003; www.agentcities.org/note/00001.

Steven Willmott is a research scientist in theLanguages and Systems Department at the Unvier-sitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona. Healso coordinates several large-scale agent tech-nology deployment initiatives. Contact him atsteve@lsi.upc.es.

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