RETSINA

RETSINA is an open multi-agent system (MAS) that supports communities of heterogeneous agents. The RETSINA system has been implemented on the premise that agents in a system should form a community of peers that engage in peer to peer interactions. Any coordination structure in the community of agents should emerge from the relations between agents, rather than as a result of the imposed constraints of the infrastructure itself. In accordance with this premise, RETSINA does not employ centralized control within the MAS; rather, it implements distributed infrastructural services that facilitate the interactions between agents, as opposed to managing them.

Following is a graphical representation of the RETSINA MAS:

The organization of the RETSINA MAS, including the capabilities and functions of the components, agents, and agent modules, is shown in the table below.

RETSINA MAS Infrastructure	Individual Agent Infrastructure in RETSINA
MAS Interoperation RETSINA-OAA Interoperator
Capability to Agent Mapping Matchmaker	Capability to Agent Mapping Matchmaker Module
Name to Location Mapping ANS	Name to Location Mapping ANS Module
Security Certificate of Authority/Cryptography Services	SECURITY Security Module/ private/public keys
Performances Services Failure Monitoring	Performances Services Self-Monitory/Cloning
MAS Management Services Logger/ActivityVisualizer/Launcher	Management Services Logger Module
ACL Infrastructure Public Ontology/Protocols Servers	ACL Infrastructure ACL Parser/Private Ontology/Protocol Engine
Communication Infrastructure Discovery/Message Transfer	Communication Modules Discovery Module/RETSINA Communicator
Operating Environment Machines, OS, Network Multicast Transport Layer: TCP/IP, Wireless, Infrared, SSL

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