The new season of AFL, and the excited coming FIFA World Cup in South Africa this June, many sports fans are willing to find the latest results of their beloved sports teams. In this project, you are requested to develop a middleware based multi agent system to track the latest score of your favourite sports team.
The architecture of this multi agent system is given above. There are three types of agents in this system:
- Yellow Page Agent (YPA): a middle agent acts as yellow page. It keeps a list of records of the currently available service provider agents who can offer information or services to others. The record of a service provider includes agent name, contact information, and the service (team name). The record is registered by a provider agent when it starts, and when it exits from the system the agent will deregister to YPA and its record will be removed from the list.
- Service Provider Agent (SPA): an information agent who can find and extract a piece of requested information, such as the most recent score of Australian soccer team, from the World Wide Web. It first registers its service information to the YPA when it becomes available to the public. After that, it is able to answer queries from other service consumer agents to search and extract the score for your team. Finally, when it quits from service, SPA deregisters from YPA so its record will be removed from the list.
- Service Consumer Agent (SCA): a software agent as an interface to human users. SCA has a GUI interface for users to input or select sports team. And then, it asks the YPA to allocate an agent who has the capability to find the score for that team. When SCA receives the contact information of a SPA from YPA, it communicates with that SPA to request the latest team result. And it will display the score returned by SPA to the user.