A Flexible Coordination Framework for Application-Oriented Matchmaking and Brokering Services

An important problem for agents in open multiagent systems is how to find agents that match certain criteria. A number of middle agent services, such as matchmaking and brokering services, have been proposed to address this problem. However, the search capabilities of such services are relatively limited since the match criteria they use are relatively inflexible. We propose ATSpace, a middle agent to support application- oriented matchmaking and brokering services. Application agents in ATSpace deliver their own search algorithms to a public tuple space which holds agent property data; the tuple space executes the search algorithms on this data. We show how the ATSpace model increases the dynamicity and flexibility of middle agent services. Unfortunately, the model also introduces security threats: the data and access control restrictions in ATSpace may be compromised, and system availability may be affected. We describe some mechanisms to mitigate these security threats.