Patent ID: 7069560

Claim:
A software-based, flexible computer architecture for communication and cooperation among distributed electronic agents, the architecture contemplating a distributed computing system comprising: a plurality of service-providing electronic agents; a distributed facilitator agent functionally distributed across at least two computer processes, the facilitator agent capable of bi-directional communications with the plurality of service-providing electronic agents, the facilitator agent including: an agent registry that declares capabilities for each of the plurality of service-providing electronic agents currently active within the distributed computing environment; and a facilitating engine operable to interpret a service request as a base goal, the facilitating engine further operable for generating a goal satisfaction plan associated with the base goal, wherein the goal satisfaction plan involves: using reasoning to determine sub-goal requests based on non-syntactic decomposition of the base goal and using said reasoning to co-ordinate and schedule efforts by the service-providing electronic agents for fulfilling the sub-goal requests in a cooperative completion of the base goal; and wherein the plurality of service-providing electronic agents and the distributed facilitator agent communicate using an interagent Communication Language (ICL), wherein the ICL includes: a layer of conversational protocol defined by event types and parameter lists associated with one or more of the events, wherein the parameter lists further refine the one or more events.