AGENT-BASED MANAGEMENT SYSTEM HAVING AN OPEN LAYERED ARCHITECTURE FOR SYNCHRONOUS AND/OR ASYNCHRONOUS MESSAGING HANDLING

A communication infrastructure providing communication between agents, between agents and agent-hosting servers, and between agent-hosting servers. The communication infrastructure consists of three layers (from bottom to top): Mail Facility Layer, Message Facility Layer, and Agent Management Communication Facility Layer. The Mail Facility Layer is the lowest layer providing a general, semantics-free mail paradigm for asynchronous communication between distributed objects, whether they are local or remote to each other. The Mail Facility Layer provides a level of abstraction in terms of mail, virtual mailbox, post office, and mail queue, and hides the details of implementation and actual transport. It is designed to provide location transparency and to be implementable using various transport protocols. The next Message Facility Layer provides a typed messaging paradigm for asynchronous and synchronous message passing between distributed objects. The Message Facility Layer uses the Mail Facility Layer for sending messages and for getting responses to requests sent. It allows for the association of typed message handlers with typed messages such that the format and semantics of messages are encapsulated through their types, are extensible, and can be processed by the associated message handlers. The Agent Management Communication Facility Layer is the highest layer providing the services for inter-agent communication between agents, agent-agent-server communication between an agent and an agent server, and inter-agent-server communication between agent servers for managing agents such as locating an agent, dispatching an agent, retrieving an agent, etc. The key abstractions provided in this layer include agent manager, agent, and agent identifier. It uses the Message