Research on extensibility and reliability of agents in Web-based Computing Resource Publishing

Web-based Computing Resource Publishing is a Web oriented metacomputing system. Agent publishing is its leading style. Extensibility and reliability are two crucial problems for the agent. We propose a parent-child agent framework and a primary-slave agent framework to improve the agents´ performance. Several problems arise in the frameworks: how to assign tasks among agents, how to schedule slave agents to select a new primary agent under condition that the original one cannot perform its role any more, and how to keep states in primary agent and slave agents consistent. Aiming at these problems, we introduce an agent coordination strategy, a slave scheduling strategy and an agent coherence algorithm.