Abstract

Large scale open multi-agent systems where agents need services of other agents but may not know their contact information require agent location mechanisms. Solutions to this problem are usually based on middle-ware such as matchmakers, brokers, yellow-pages agents and other middle agents. The disadvantage of these is that they impose infrastructure, protocol and communication overheads, and they do not easily scale up. We suggest a new approach to agent location, which does not require middle agents and protocols for using them. Our approach is simple and scales up with no infrastructure or protocol overheads, thus may be very useful for large scale MAS. In this paper, we analytically study the properties of our approach and discuss its advantages. 1 Introduction Multi-agent systems (MAS) are taking an increasing role in the solution of highly distributed computational problems in dynamic, open domains. We assume that large-scale open MAS will be an inevitable part of this trend. T...

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