Developing Real Applications With Agent Technologies

Abstract

In this paper, we present an agent library to develop multi-agent applications. Such an agent library has been realised taking into account FIPA specifications. FIPA specifications give the minimum amount of technology deemed necessary for the management of agents in an open agent system, including agent roles, an agent communication language, an agent management content language, and a standard way to interact with non-agentised software. Therefore, the library offers the prototypes of the agents necessary for the management of a FIPA agent open system and an agent prototype that the user can specialise to build the other agents necessary for her/his application. The library has been implemented both in C++ and Java. The two implementations support a logical distribution, i.e., the agents correspond to different threads, and a physical distribution, i. e., agents of the same applications run on different machines. The Java library has been used to develop a multi-agent system, that facilitates users to use a video on demand service, and a first prototype of the system is under experimentation. The C++ library is used for the development of a multi-agent system that should integrate the different software modules performing sensory data interpretation, planning, faults diagnosis, . . . of a robot working in a space station.