Smartive: Agreement-based Mobile Composite Agents for Multimedia Services

This work considers encapsulation of multimedia contents as services, and their autonomous provision and distribution by agents. This approach enables content providers to have their contents provided and distributed together with their own business logics regarding interaction with other services and contents, control logic for various options upon provision, and value-added services. This paper proposes a framework for development of agents that provide and distribute such content services. In the framework, the interaction logic of agents is first developed in the same way as in development of ordinary Web services. Control descriptions are then given for each aspect, such as selection of partner agents, negotiation on service options, and migration. The separated descriptions for each aspect facilitate incremental development and test, as well as later modification, of agents with complex behaviors.