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Inter-Agent Communication (Future)

(This document is a placeholder for a future design consideration. It will discuss potential mechanisms and protocols for enabling multiple Dana agents, possibly running in different processes or even on different machines, to communicate and collaborate.)

Potential Aspects to Consider (for Future Design):

  • Motivation: Why is inter-agent communication needed? (e.g., distributed problem solving, specialized agent roles, multi-user collaboration through agents).
  • Communication Paradigms:
  • Message Passing: Agents send messages directly to each other or through a message broker.
  • Protocols: HTTP-based (REST, WebSockets), custom protocols, message queue systems (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka via a Resource).
  • Shared State/Knowledge Base: Agents communicate indirectly by reading and writing to a common data store (e.g., a distributed database, a graph database via a Resource).
  • Service Calls: Agents expose capabilities as services that other agents can call (similar to microservices).
  • Message Content and Format:
  • Standardized message schemas (e.g., using Dana structs serialized to JSON).
  • Ontologies or shared vocabularies for meaningful communication.
  • Agent Discovery: How do agents find each other on a network?
  • Directory services, registries.
  • Security and Trust:
  • Authentication and authorization for inter-agent messages.
  • Encryption of communication channels.
  • Preventing malicious agents or unauthorized access.
  • Coordination Mechanisms:
  • Protocols for common interaction patterns (e.g., request-reply, subscriptions, auctions, voting).
  • Distributed consensus or agreement protocols (if needed for complex collaboration).
  • Dana Language Support:
  • Would Dana need specific language features to support inter-agent communication, or would this be handled entirely through Resources (e.g., a MessagingResource, DistributedContextResource)?
  • Impact on SandboxContext: How would messages or shared state from other agents be represented or influence an agent's local SandboxContext?

Self-reflection: Inter-agent communication is a complex topic, typically addressed in later stages of agent system development. For now, this is a placeholder to acknowledge its potential future relevance. The initial focus will be on single-agent capabilities and orchestration within one Dana runtime.