Giovanni Rimassa

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.

Autonomic Goal-Oriented Business Process Management

This paper outlines an autonomic approach to business process management using goal-oriented principles and autonomous agent technology employing the well-known BDI method. We discuss how the structure of common business processes can be mapped onto goal-oriented models where achievement points are represented by goals and the task structures used to reach them are represented by plans. The flexibility afforded by this approach implies that autonomic feedback loops are created between the business process incarnation and its autonomous controller, which may be extended to the multiple process case where several controllers interact to form extended feedback relationships. We introduce a set of technologies designed to deliver these features in real-world applications and support the position with a case study in the domain of Engineering Change Management.

Multi-Agent Corporate Memory Management System

This paper presents an approach to design a multi-agent system managing a corporate memory in the form of a distributed semantic Web and describes the resulting architecture. The system was designed during the CoMMA European project (Corporate Memory Management through Agents) and aims at helping users in the management of a corporate memory, facilitating the creation, dissemination, transmission, and reuse of knowledge in an organization. The implementation integrated several emerging technologies: multi-agent system technology (using the JADE FIPA-compliant platform), knowledge modeling and XML technology for information retrieval (using the CORESE semantic search engine), and machine learning techniques. Here, we describe the agent roles and interactions, we explain the design rationale for the agent societies, and we discuss the configuration and implementation issues.

Towards seamless agent middleware

This paper describes the current evolution of agent middleware, supporting and promoting an autonomous agent component model. We first assess the current state of agent technology, then we make a case for increased integration between agents and their environment, composed by entities with different models. We notice that this integration trend emerged more and more in the last few years, but there are still important issues to be tackled and solved. Examples drawn from our experience with concrete agent infrastructures such as JADE are used to ground the discussion.

The Living Systems Technology Suite: An Autonomous Middleware for Autonomic Computing

This paper presents the Living Systemsreg Technology Suite, LS/TS, a middleware based on autonomous software agents and autonomic computing principles. Specifically, the paper describes the autonomic principles built into LS/TS, and the features that follow from them. These features are described within the context of a general taxonomy of autonomic systems, elaborating on the relationship between middleware and application levels. Lastly, the paper addresses the problem of system self-representation, leveraging LS/TS support for ontology and semantic agent communication

An Operating System Support to Low-Overhead Communications in NOW Clusters

This paper describes an Operating System approach to the problem of delivering low latency high bandwidth communications for PC clusters running a public domain OS like Linux and connected by standard, off-the-shelf networks like Fast-Ethernet. The PARMA2 project has the main goal of designing the new light-weight protocol suite PRP, in order to drastically reduce the software overhead introduced by TCP/IP. PRP wants to offer at high level a stream socket oriented interface and at low level compatibility with any device driver. High level compatibility is crucial in facilitating the porting on PRP of existing applications or message passing packages. Moreover, an optimized version of MPI, based on PRP and evolution of the widespread MPICH implementation, is under development, allowing for a very effective reduction of the communication latencies in synchronous communications, compared to the TCP/IP-based MPI.

A FIPA compliant goal delegation protocol

This paper presents an interaction protocol, built on top of FIPA ACL, allowing an agent to delegate a goal to another agent, in the form of a proposition that the delegating agent intends its delegate to bring about. The proposed protocol addresses the concrete needs of a service that is to be deployed within the Agent Cities network, but also helps to highlight some issues that are related to the FIPA ACL itself and its usage to build more complex agent interaction blocks.

Integrating objective & subjective coordination in multi-agent systems

Subjective and objective coordination can be integrated and exploited fruitfully in the same context. In this paper we investigate such integration in multi-agent systems, in particular taking as a reference context FIPA agents - typically adopting subjective approaches - aiming at exploiting the coordination services provided by TuCSoN objective coordination infrastructure.