CoABS Grid

The Control of Agent Based System (CoABS) Grid is an advanced service-oriented architecture (SOA) that supports distributed object management; mobile computing and surrogate processing for constrained devices; multi-modal, adaptive user interfaces; collaborative computing; intelligent software; and intelligent heterogeneous data access. It supports protocol-independent communications and provides rapid, evolutionary development of user-centered information systems that can be easily integrated into legacy systems. CoABS has been developed with military applications in mind and provides a general-purpose, lightweight integration framework for a wide variety of applications. The CoABS grid is based on JINI and RMI.

The CoABS Grid is designed to integrate large-scale distributed applications from small independently developed components to meet the needs of rapidly evolving, geographically dispersed organizations. The technology's goal is to strike a practical balance between recent innovations in distributed agent technology, emerging from advanced research, and the practical demands of real-world applications.

CoABS has layered a message-oriented middleware (MOM) on top of the SOA to support asynchronous messaging, and publish and subscribe for tailored delivery of information. This MOM forms the basis of CoABS's agent-based computing infrastructure and increases the interoperability, portability, and flexibility of an application by allowing the application to be distributed over multiple heterogeneous platforms. It reduces the complexity of developing applications that span multiple operating systems and network protocols by insulating the application developer from the details of the various operating systems and network interfaces. Agent software supports asynchronous calls between the client and server applications and message queues provide temporary storage when the destination program is busy or not connected.

Key characteristics of this framework are the ability to support dynamic registration, discovery, interoperability, tailored delivery (publish and subscribe), asynchronous agent messaging, message storage, and secure exchange of information. There are four main interoperable components of the CoABS framework: services, agents, publishers, and subscribers. This infrastructure enables dynamic reconfiguration without involvement of operators as systems join and leave. This framework can conserve bandwidth by providing only the pertinent information to the warfighters.

CoABS Grid was designed and developed by Global InfoTek, Inc. (GITI) for the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA).

External links

• Global InfoTek, Inc. (GITI)