CASCOM Agent Platform

The CASCOM Project was a research project where an infrastructure for semantic web based business application services for mobile and desktop devices was designed and implemented.

The specific implemented use case scenario that used the system was an emergency assistance scenario where a tourist contacted local emergency dispatch center using his mobile phone application. The location and symptoms of tourist was automatically sent to emergency center, nearest ambulance automatically assigned and ambulance staff could see tourist's medical records, location on map and route to patient. Also tourist's insurance company was automatically contacted and a medical rescue team at tourist's homeland was automatically informed.

The communication in the CASCOM infrastructure was implemented using JADE-LEAP agent platform but for mobile phones the platform needed to be very much modified in order to be fully standalone (JADE-LEAP MIDP version cannot run without a host running on J2SE device).

So far propably the only one in the world, fully MIDP 2.0/CLDC1.1 compliant completely standalone version of JADE-LEAP -agent platform is available from CASCOM website. The platform offers many features that so far have been available only on J2SE version of JADE and not in JADE-LEAP MIDP-version:

  • Platform can be started totally standalone in mobile phone without desktop host in fixed network.
  • Contains the full JADE MTP architecture for communication, thus interplatform communication is FIPA compliant.
  • HTTP MTP implementation for FIPA compliant HTTP messaging.
  • Support for CASCOM Messaging Gateway for unreliable wireless connections.
  • Full FIPA-SL content language support.
  • JADE ACL-codec architecture
  • Bit-efficient ACL codecs with support for ACL message content compression (eg. Gzip, srank) and/or encryption.
  • AMS and DF agents running on mobile device

In addition, platform contains simple GUI for administrative actions.

CASCOM Gateway

Cascom Messaging Gateway is a routing and buffering software for CASCOM Agent Platform, which makes it possible to use CASCOM Agent Platform or other compliant platform in UMTS networks or networks where firewalls prevent direct bidirectional connections between platforms. Software also buffers the messages when mobile platform is disconnected. CASCOM Messaging Gateway is available from CASCOM website.

Status

The CASCOM project has ended in year 2007 and thus also development of CASCOM Agent Platform and CASCOM Messaging Gateway, at least on my behalf. However, if you are interested, the software is open source and you can download it on CASCOM website.

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