Lyndon C. Lee

Zeus: A toolkit for building distributed multiagent systems

The multiagent systems approach of knowledge- level cooperation between autonomous agents promises significant benefits to distributed systems engineering, such as enhanced interoperability, scalability, and reconfigurability. However, thus far, because of the innate difficulty of constructing multiagent systems, this promise has been largely unrealized. Hence there is an emerging desire among agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favor of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multiagent systems. This philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent- level components and an environment to support the agent-building process. The ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent-building environment.

ZEUS: a toolkit and approach for building distributed multi-agent systems

The innate difficulty of constructing multi-agent systems has motivated agent developers to move away from developing point solutions to point problems in favour of developing methodologies and toolkits for building distributed multi-agent systems. This philosophy led to the development of the ZEUS Agent Building Toolkit, which facilitates the rapid development of collaborative agent applications through the provision of a library of agent-level components and an environment to support the agent building process. The ZEUS toolkit is a synthesis of established agent technologies with some novel solutions to provide an integrated collaborative agent building environment.

Visualising and debugging distributed multi-agent systems

Visualising the behaviour of systems with distributed data, control and process is a notoriously difficult task. Each component in the distributed system has only a local view of the whole set-up, and the onus is on the user to integrate, into a coherent whole, the large amounts of limited information they provide. In this paper, we describe an architecture and an implemented system for visualising and controlling distributed multi-agent applications. The system comprises a suite of tools, with each tool providing a different perspective of the application being visualised. Each tool interrogates the components of the distributed application, collates the returned information and presents this information to users in an appropriate manner. This in essence shifts the burden of inference from the user to the visualiser. Our visualiser has been evaluated on four distributed multi-agent systems: a travel management application, a telecommunications network management application, a business process management demonstrator, and an electronic commerce application. Lastly, we briefly show how the suite of tools can be used together for debugging multi-agent applications an approach we refer to as debugging via corroboration.

Co-ordination in Multi-Agent Systems

The objective of this paper is to examine the crucial area of coordination in multi-agent systems. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of the co-ordination literature; rather, it highlights the necessity for co-ordination in agent systems and overviews briefly various co-ordination techniques. It critiques these techniques and presents some conclusions and challenges drawn from this literature.

Building Electronic Marketplaces with the ZEUS Agent Tool-kit

The increasing popularity of the Internet provides personal computer users with direct access to a wealth of information sources and services, and potentially a massive global marketplace. Unfortunately current home shopping systems are primitive; what the consumer wants is a personal shopping agent -an intelligent, reliable proxy who is aware of personal preferences, and who can take over the tedious task of searching the Internet for the best possible deal. Likewise retailers would like to use the Internet to attract a much larger volume of potential customers, who could be serviced quickly and efficiently at a much lower cost. This vision is seductive, so why has it not yet been realised? This paper considers why agent-based commerce is inherently difficult, and advocates collaborative agent technology as a means of more easily building distributed marketplaces. To illustrate this principle we have built a prototype multi-agent virtual marketplace with ZEUS, a generic collaborative agent tool-kit.

Visualization and debugging of distributed multiagent systems

Visualizing the behavior of systems with distributed data, control, and process is a notoriously difficult task. Each component in the distributed system has only a local view of the whole setup, and the onus is on the user to integrate, into a coherent whole, the large amounts of limited information they provide. In this article, we describe an architecture and an implemented system for visualizing and controlling distributed multiagent applications. The system comprises a suite of tools, with each tool providing a different perspective of the application being visualized . Each tool interrogates the components of the distributed application, collates the returned information, and presents this information to users in an appropriate manner. This in essence, shifts the burden ofinference from the user to the visualizer. Our visualizer has been evaluated on four distributed multiagent systems: a travel management application, a telecommunications network management application, a business process managemen...