Prior art — US Patent 6851115

Most Relevant Prior Art for US Patent 6851115

To identify the most relevant prior art for US Patent 6851115, a direct search of the USPTO database for the patent itself is necessary to access its cited references. The prior art listed within the patent document itself (under the "References Cited" section) is typically considered by the patent examiner during prosecution and is thus highly relevant.

Based on the provided patent text, I will identify the prior art mentioned within the description of US Patent 6851115.

The patent mentions "Prior Art FIG. 1" and "Prior Art FIG. 2" in its description, referring to:

FIG. 1: Networked computing model. This figure illustrates a basic networked computing model with client and server computer systems connected over a physical transport mechanism. The description notes that "The adoption of the networked computing model 100 has lead to a greatly increased reliance on distributed sites for both data and processing resources." It also refers to the Internet as a computing system based on this model. This concept broadly anticipates any claim involving distributed computing and networked client-server interactions. As this is a general conceptual drawing of networked computing, it would likely anticipate the broad structural elements of systems described in claims like Claim 1 (distributed agent system with agents and a facilitator over a network) or aspects of Claim 13 (method involving client and facilitator interaction over a network).
FIG. 2: Distributed object technology based around an Object Request Broker (ORB). This figure depicts an object system with client objects and server objects, using an ORB to store interface descriptions of available objects and facilitate method invocation on remote server objects. The patent text states, "Although distributed objects offer a powerful paradigm for creating networked applications, certain aspects of the approach are not perfectly tailored to the constantly changing environment of the Internet." It also mentions limitations of DOOP, such as fixed interactions and reliance on remote procedure calls (RPC). This prior art would be relevant to claims that involve distributed software components and their communication, particularly if they specify a registry or brokering mechanism. It could potentially anticipate aspects of Claim 1 (distributed agent system with brokered communication) and Claim 13 (method of processing goals involving communication between distributed components), especially those relating to transparent invocation of services, though the patent aims to differentiate itself from DOOP by offering greater flexibility and less programmatic specificity.

In addition to the figures depicting prior art, the patent description discusses several existing approaches and technologies for distributed computing as "Prior Related Art" (Section 2. Prior Related Art). These include:

The Distributed Object Approach: This section elaborates on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts (encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism) and Distributed Object Technologies (DOOP) like CORBA's Object Request Broker (ORB). As mentioned above, this broadly relates to the brokering of communication between distributed software components. This approach directly relates to the concept of a facilitator agent coordinating communication, as described in Independent Claim 1, by highlighting the limitations of prior approaches that rely on fixed interactions and explicit method calls. It sets the stage for the inventive steps in flexibility and autonomy.
Mobile Objects (Mobile Agents): The patent describes mobile objects as "bits of code that can move to another execution site...where they can then interact with the local environment." Advantages like network bandwidth and parallelism are noted, but disadvantages include programmatic specificity of agent interactions and lack of coordination support. This prior art is relevant to any claims involving mobile or distributed software entities. While not directly anticipating the facilitator's specific role, it presents a context for distributed autonomous entities that the present invention seeks to improve upon in terms of coordination and interaction flexibility, as laid out in Independent Claim 1.
Blackboard Architectures: These are described as allowing "multiple processes to communicate by reading and writing tuples from a global data store." The patent states they "provide a flexible framework for problem solving by a dynamic community of distributed processes." However, a disadvantage mentioned is the lack of programmatic control for referring to specific processes. This directly relates to the facilitator providing a "global data store for its client agents, allowing them to adopt a blackboard style of interaction" (as mentioned in the detailed description of FIG. 4). This could potentially anticipate aspects of Independent Claim 1 concerning cooperative task completion among agents and the facilitator providing communication mechanisms.
Agent-based Software Engineering: The patent mentions that "Agent-based systems have shown much promise for flexible, fault-tolerant, distributed problem solving," and "Several agent-based projects have helped to evolve the notion of facilitation." However, it criticizes existing technologies for being "very limited in the extent to which agents can specify complex goals or influence the strategies used by the facilitator." It also states that prior systems "are not sufficiently attuned to the importance of integrating human agents (i.e., users) through natural language and other human-oriented user interface technologies." The "initial version of SRI International's Open Agent Architecture™ ("OAA®") technology" is specifically mentioned as prior art with limitations regarding compound goals, fixed formats for sub-goals, hard-wired parallel goal solving, and inadequate scalability. This is a crucial self-citation of prior art by the inventors, as it outlines the problems the present patent aims to solve. The limitations of the prior OAA technology directly relate to the inventive steps of handling "arbitrarily complex goal expressions" (Claim 1 and 13) and the flexible ICL (Claim 18), as well as scalability solutions (implicitly addressed by the architecture).

Specific References Mentioned:

The patent text explicitly references one external publication as part of the "Agent development tools and services" discussion:

Cheyer et al.'s paper entitled "Development Tools for the Open Agent Architecture," as presented at the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM 96), London, April 1996. This paper describes development tools for the Open Agent Architecture (OAA), which is identified as prior work by SRI International. This publication would be highly relevant to claims related to the agent architecture, interagent communication, and development tools. Given that the patent itself states that "The initial version of SRI International's Open Agent Architecture™ ("OAA®") technology provided only a very limited mechanism for dealing with compound goals," this paper likely describes aspects of that "initial version." It would therefore potentially anticipate elements of the system, method, and language claims (Claims 1, 13, 18, 25, 35) that deal with basic agent-facilitator interaction, agent registration, and communication, but likely not the advancements related to arbitrarily complex goals, dynamic ICL expansion, or enhanced scalability that the present patent claims to introduce. The publication date (April 1996) is prior to the priority date of US6851115 (January 5, 1999).

To provide a more comprehensive list of prior art citations and their potential anticipation, a direct search of the USPTO database for US6851115 would be necessary to retrieve all cited patent and non-patent literature.

It is important to note that the provided text states that the patent is "Expired - Lifetime" as of 2019-01-05. This means the patent is no longer enforceable.