![](bg8.png)
• Account management service – for creating,
maintaining, verifying and closing bank
accounts
Security mechanisms have been developed to
protect the access to the Banking Service, supporting
core security requirements such as message
confidentiality, message integrity and agent
authentication. Additionally, an authorisation model
is closely linked to the authentication model using
simple policies or profiles. A Certificate Authority
(CA) service which provides credential management
services is published on an agent server hosted on
the Agentcities network. A plug-in for agent security
management is installed on clients and the Banking
Service to provide the necessary security support.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Agentcities is certainly the greatest effort to create a
global network of FIPA-compliant agent platforms.
It is giving a great impulse toward the openness and
interoperability of different agent platforms and
agent-based applications, paving the way for a large
and distributed society of agents.
This paper focused on a particular application
that, relying on the marketplace infrastructure
deployed on the Agentcities network, is able to
dynamically discover and negotiate some services
offered by different providers. Even if the scope of
the prototype application was not to advocate any
particular technology or approach but was simply
demonstrative of the network potentiality, it can be
interesting to draw some remarks about the traits of
the system deployed.
What mainly characterizes it is its decentralized
architecture based on whatever number of
marketplace instances. Considering the ability of the
agents to assemble a compound service on
customers’ request, the system represents a good
support for dynamic adaptive composition, by taking
maximum advantage of the currently available
services. The distributed nature of the system, on the
other side, makes any control on the composition
process difficult, for example to add load balancing,
fault tolerance, and transactional features.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to all Agentcities partners who contributed
to the development of the project. This work is
partially supported by the European Commission
through the contract ALA/2002/049-055 @lis
TechNet, and by the "Ministero dell'Istruzione,
dell'Università e della Ricerca" through the contract
ANEMONE.
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