Matchmaker

Given the growing number of agents that now provide services on the World Wide Web, we have developed an agent system called the Matchmaker that will do the work of helping agents find each other.

The Matchmaker is an information agent that helps make connections between agents that request services and agents that provide services. The Matchmaker serves as a "yellow pages" of agent capabilities, matching service providers with service requestors based on agent capability descriptions. The Matchmaker system allows agents to find each other by providing a mechanism for registering each agent's capabilities. An agent's registration information is stored as an "advertisement," which provides a short description of the agent, a sample query, input and output parameter declarations, and other constraints.

When the Matchmaker agent receives a query from a user or another software agent, it searches its dynamic database of "advertisements" for a registered agent that can fulfill the incoming request. The Matchmaker thus serves as a liaison between an agent that requests services and an agent that can fulfill requests for services.

Robotics Institute Project Page

Matchmaker Applications
The Matchmaker is used in the following applications:

• wireless collaboration and communications
• military logistics planning
• supply-chain management
• joint mission planning
• financial portolio management
• non-combatant evacuation operation

Registering Agents
To register your agents with the Matchmaker, please go to the A-Match website.

New! The Semantic Matchmaker
In order to solve the problems matching services in the developing "web of services," we have developed The Semantic Matchmaker, a DAML-S-based matching entity that will allow web services to locate other services, provide a solution to the problem of matching, and allow for full implementation of interoperative service providers on the web.

Publications on Middle Agents and Matchmakers (See Publications page for complete listing of publications.)

• G. Denker, L. Kagal, T. Finin, M. Paolucci, N. Srinivasan, and K. Sycara, "Security For DAML Web Services: Annotation and Matchmaking," in Proceedings of the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), Sandial Island, FL, USA, October 2003, pp 335-350.
  
  
• T. Kawamura, J. A. De Blasio, T. Hasegawa, M. Paolucci, and K. Sycara, "A Preliminary Report of a Public Experiment of a Semantic Service Matchmaker combined with a UDDI Business Registry," in 1st International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2003), Trento, Italy, December 2003.
  
  
• M., Takahiro Kawamura, T. R. Payne, and K. Sycara, "Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities."

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• T. Payne, M. Paolucci, R. Singh, R. and K. Sycara, "Facilitating Message Exchange through Middle Agents," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Bologna, Italy, July 15-19, 2002.
  
  
• K. Sycara, Brokering and Matchmaking for Coordination of Agent Societies: A Survey. In Coordination of Internet Agents, A. Omicini et al. (eds.), Springer., 2001.
  
  
• H.-C. Wong and K. Sycara, "A Taxonomy of Middle-agents for the Internet," in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS'2000) (An extended version of the paper is available [here].)
  
  
• M. Paolucci, Z. Niu, K. Sycara, C. Domashnev, S.Owens and M. Van Velsen, "Matchmaking to Support Intelligent Agents for Portfolio Management." in Proceedings of AAAI2000 (Demo Session).
  
  
• K. Sycara, J. Lu, M. Klusch, and S. Widoff, "Matchmaking Among Heterogeneous Agents on the Internet.," in Proceedings AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Agents in Cyberspace, Stanford, USA, 1999.
  
  
• K. Sycara, M. Klusch, S. Widoff, and J. Lu, "Dynamic Service Matchmaking Among Agents in Open Information Environments," in Journal ACM SIGMOD Record (Special Issue on Semantic Interoperability in Global Information Systems), A. Ouksel, A. Sheth (Eds.), Vol. 28, No. 1, March 1999, pp. 47-53.
  
  
• K. Sycara, K. Decker, and M. Williamson, "Middle-Agents for the Internet," in Proceedings of IJCAI-97, January 1997.
  
  
• K. Decker, K. Sycara, and M. Williamson, "Matchmaking and Brokering," in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-96), December 1996.