Agostino Poggi

Developing multi-agent systems with a FIPA-compliant agent framework

To ease large‐scale realization of agent applications there is an urgent need for frameworks, methodologies and toolkits that support the effective development of agent systems. Moreover, since one of the main tasks for which agent systems were invented is the integration between heterogeneous software, independently developed agents should be able to interact successfully.

JADE: a FIPA2000 compliant agent development environment

JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is a software environment to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA2000 specifications for interoperable intelligent multi- agent systems. The goal of JADE is to simplify development while ensuring standard compliance through a comprehensive set of system services and agents. JADE offers an agent runtime system on which implement efficient FIPA 2000 compliant multi- agent systems and supports their development through the availability of a predefined programmable agent model and of a set of management and testing tools. This paper describes the main features of the JADE system and introduces some of the most important projects based on JADE software.

JADE: A software framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned

Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributed software systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has been done, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from the research community to the industrial community. One of these is JADE, a software framework that facilitates development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems and that is distributed under an Open Source License. JADE is a very mature product, used by a heterogeneous community of users both in research activities and in industrial applications. This paper presents JADE and its technological components together with a discussion of the possible reasons for its success and lessons learned from the somewhat detached perspective possible nine years after its inception.

Jade — A Java Agent Development Framework

JADE (Java Agent Development Framework) is a software environment to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA specifications for interoperable multi-agent systems. JADE provides a middleware for the development and execution of agent-based applications which can seamless work and interoperate both in wired and wireless environment. Moreover, JADE supports the development of multi-agent systems through the predefined programmable and extensible agent model and a set of management and testing tools. Currently, JADE is one of the most used and promising agent development framework; in fact, it has a large user group, involving more than two thousands active members, it has been used to realize real systems in different application sectors, and its future development is guided by a governing board involving some important industrial companies.

LEAP: A FIPA Platform for Handheld and Mobile Devices

The ever-increasing importance of the market of portable devices is promoting the migration of technologies originally developed for the fixed network to the mobile network. This paper describes the general aim and the current results of a European-scale project intended to provide the enabling technology for deploying multi-agent systems across fixed and mobile networks. The LEAP project achieves its goal realising a FIPA platform that can be deployed seamlessly on any Java-enabled device with sufficient resources and with a wired or wireless connection. Such a platform is implemented as a new kernel for JADE to ease the migration of legacy agents to the mobile network and it exploits a modular design to scale its functionality with the capabilities of the device.

Exploiting UML in the Design of Multi-agent Systems

A basic concept of software engineering is that a system can be described at different levels of abstraction. Agent-oriented software engineering introduces a new level of abstraction, called the agent level, to allow software architects modelling a system in terms of interacting agents. This level of abstraction is not yet supported by an accepted diagrammatic notation even if a number of proposals are available. This work shows how UML can be exploited to model a multi-agent system at the agent level. In particular, it presents a set of agent-oriented diagrams intended to provide an UML-based notation to model: the architecture of the multi-agent system, the ontology followed by agents and the interaction protocols used to co-ordinate agents. The presented notation exploits stereotypes to associate an agent-oriented semantic with class and collaboration diagrams. The benefit of using stereotypes rather than extending UML to provide an agent-oriented semantic is that the presented notation can be used with any off-the-shelf CASE tool.

A collaborative platform for fixed and mobile networks

C/Webtop: providing users with a means for collaborating while on the move.

Deploying FIPA-compliant systems on handheld devices

LEAP is a runtime environment for deploying agents on a network of Java-enabled devices. It complies with FIPA international standards for multiagent systems. The Lightweight Extensive Agent Platform project is the first attempt to implement a FIPA agent platform that runs seamlessly on both mobile and fixed devices over both wireless and wired networks.

Security and Trust in Agent-Oriented Middleware

Spreading of technologies as peer-to-peer networks, web services, multi-agent systems, ubiquitous computing, shows a clear trend toward open and highly distributed systems, requiring wide and dynamic overlay networks. But mass adoption of these technologies, especially in contexts where sensible resources are handled, will come true only if they will be able to guarantee a proper level of security. This paper presents the implementation of a security layer for JADE, a standard-based and widely deployed framework to build multi-agent systems. The proposed model, founded on delegation certificates, allows the management of trust relations among autonomous software agents collaborating and competing in wide and open agent societies, but it is also used to protect the underlying distributed infrastructure, providing required resources and services to hosted agents. Our approach, where policies are based on keys instead of names, enhances robustness and scalability by greatly reducing the impact of certificate directory unavailability on the authorization mechanism.

DAISY: an object-oriented system for Distributed Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents an object-oriented distributed system, called DAISY, for the development and experimentation of Distributed Artificial Intelligence systems and algorithms. This system is based on two programming levels: object level and agent level. Both the levels allow to define, implement and experiment systems. While the object level offers a large set of “low level” programming means (a large set of program constructs, a set of “low level” communication procedures, and so on), the agent level, which is implemented on the object level, offers a limited set of “high level” programming means (few program constructs, a fixed set of “high level” communication procedures derived by speech act theory and a fixed set of “high level” procedures to manage agents knowledge). In particular, the paper shows the use of DAISY for modeling an airline reservation scenario and a manufacturing plant scenario.