Brokering Services in Cooperative Distributed Systems: Privacy-Based Model

With the huge explosion of the Internet and the increasing demand on service and data network supply, many rapidly growing research avenues and industries are being created and revolutionized, such as electronic business. An important aspect of cooperative distributed systems is the ability of its entities to exercise some degree of authority in sharing their capabilities. This paper presents novel agent-based architecture for capability-based integration, or brokering services. The proposed architecture is based on several design principles that deal with transparency, heterogeneity and autonomy as well as the privacy issues. Here, privacy has been treated in terms of three attributes: the entity’s identity, capability and preferences. A brokering service is modeled as an agent with a specific architecture and interaction protocol that are appropriate to meet the required privacy degree. The proposed architecture has been implemented for distributed information gathering application using a FIPA-complaint platform (JADE).