Cooperative agents and their application in the Internet

In order to resolve the problem brought by the heterogeneity dynamics and distribution features of the Internet, we introduce agents and brokers into the Internet. A agent is an autonomic entity which represents a heterogeneity-interfaced object to provide a uniform interface; the broker provides the means by which agents can be aware and cooperate with each other efficiently. After giving the agent-based resource heterogeneity model, the broker-based agent cooperation model and their mathematical description using colored Petri nets, we discuss the Web cooperative retrieval system, whose kernel elements are broker-centered cooperative agents. The system is featured by the virtual resource base (VRB), and it supports the cooperative retrieval simultaneously on several distributive resource bases