(A) framework for multi-agent systems with multi-modal user interfaces in distributed computing environments

Abstract

In current multi-agent systems, the user is typically interacting with a single agent at a time through inflexible and relatively low-level form- based user interfaces. As a consequence, these systems force the users to submit simplistic requests only and suffer from problems such as the low- level nature of the system services offered to users, the weak reusability of agents, and the weak extensibility of the systems. In some cases of complex requests from users, the components of the requests will correspond to the capabilities of various application agents, and therefore, the requests should be handled through simple decomposition. In other cases, the user*s model of the task will not match with the structure of the community of agents, and the system will have to translate the user*s model into the systems model before apportioning subtasks to the agents. In this thesis, we provide general multi-agent facilities by which multi-agent systems are able to be not only intelligent and distributed but also highly extensible and reusable. The first one of those facilities is the open agent architecture (OAA). The OAA is a multi-agent system framework that supports the creation of applications from agents that were not designed to work together. It facilitates effective reuse of the expertise embodied in an agent. The second is the multi-modal user interface, which can be viewed as a support for human agents to access the multi-agent systems. We have developed agent- based multi-modal user interfaces using the same architecture used to build the back-ends of these applications, namely, the OAA. Finally, we suggests the Agent Development Toolkit(ADT) for the purpose of dynamic extension of agents and complex requests of users. It is our viewpoint that a natural language interface is an appropriate component because it provides an effective support to the users in stating complex queries. One of the challenges that are encountered in using a natural language in ...