Java Agent Development Framework Research Articles

Multi-Agent System in Web Services

The term "service-oriented architecture" (SOA) refers to a software paradigm for creating systems made up of a variety of services that interact with one another to accomplish a certain task. The communications involve more than just transmitting data back and forth; they also connect two or more services to coordinate the required operations. Cross-platform communication is necessary for the coordinating process when services are spread across several platforms. Several web service standards and specifications are used in the present SOA implementation. Based on the prototype's implementation and simulation, this proposed research study has been validated and evaluated. The suggested cross-platform communications architecture is implemented using NetBeans, JADE, WSIG, and OWL-S. An integrated development environment for Java is offered by Oracle in the form of NetBeans. Telecom Italia's Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) is an agent software framework that is entirely built in the Java language. Web Service Integration Gateway (WSIG), which helps to facilitate JADE agent services being called by Web service clients. The core fundamental engine of the suggested framework is OWL-S. It is a web ontology language used to describe Semantic Web Services in the Semantic Web's OWL-based framework. A quantitative approach is used in this study's performance analysis and comparative investigation for evaluation and validation. The prototype's major element is the Java agent development framework (JADE), which was used to create a multi-agent system for the agent-based MOM framework that has been presented. The creation of the multi-agent systems was facilitated by the JADE platform. JADE 3.7 was the version that was employed. Two key features of JADE are a FIPA-compliant agent platform and a package for creating Java agents. The implementation results show that the proposed agent-based MOM framework was successful communicate between multiple types of SOA application with a better performance of the average of round-trip time where the proposed framework was successful in responding to all the requests.

Multi-Modal Decentralized Interaction in Multi-Entity Systems

Current multi-agent frameworks usually use centralized, fixed communication infrastructures for the entities that are deployed using them. This decreases the robustness of the system but is less challenging when having to deal with mobile agents that can migrate between nodes. We introduce, in the context of the FLASH-MAS (Fast and Lightweight Agent Shell) multi-entity deployment framework, methods to build decentralized interaction infrastructures which support migrating entities. We discuss the WS-Regions (WebSocket Regions) communication protocol, a proposal for interaction in deployments using multiple communication methods, and a mechanism to facilitate using arbitrary names for entities. The WS-Regions Protocol is compared against Jade (the Java Agent Development Framework), the most popular agent deployment framework, with a favorable trade-off between decentralization and performance.

Multi-agent-based collaborative regulation optimization for microgrid economic dispatch under a time-based price mechanism

• This paper provides a multi-agent based coordinated dispatch strategy for the economic dispatch of the microgrid under a time-based price mechanism. • We develop a microgrid optimization model for the microgrid operation process, which includes battery regulation and user satisfaction. • The established optimization model is solved using a MACPSO algorithm, and the agent communication mechanism in the microgrid is examined. • The performance comparison using different algorithms (PSO, IPSO, MAPSO and MACPSO) has been presented. • The proposed multi-agent coordinated dispatch strategy is validated by designing a multi-agent system simulation environment and using the Java agent development (JADE) framework. The economic optimal dispatch of a microgrid is a challenging task with significant economic and social implications. Under a time-based price mechanism, this paper proposes a multi-agent-based coordinated dispatch strategy for the microgrid's economic dispatch. The information between the agents in the microgrid can be fed back in time to reduce microgrid operation failures by coordinated control between the demand-side load, the battery, and the power generation side micro-sources. The output of other micro-sources is then coordinated using an appropriate battery charging and discharging plan based on the characteristics of the time-based electricity price mechanism. Following that, an economical microgrid operation model is established and solved using a multi-agent chaotic particle swarm optimization (MACPSO) algorithm, which considers user satisfaction. Finally, a multi-agent system (MAS) simulation environment is built using the Java agent development (JADE) framework. The proposed microgrid with multi-agent coordinated control can effectively improve its operation efficiency, according to a comparative analysis of examples.

Multi-agent-based dynamic railway scheduling and optimization: a coloured petri-net model

This paper addresses the issues concerning the rescheduling of a static timetable in case of a disaster, encountered in a large and complex railway network system. The proposed approach tries to modify the existing schedule to minimise the overall delay of trains. This is achieved by representing the rescheduling problem in the form of a Petri-Net and the highly uncertain disaster recovery time in such a model is handled as Markov decision processes (MDP). For solving the rescheduling problem, a distributed constraint optimisation (DCOP)-based strategy involving the use of autonomous agents is used to generate the desired schedule. The proposed approach is evaluated on the real-time data set taken from the Eastern Railways, India by constructing various disaster scenarios using the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE). The proposed framework, when compared to the existing approaches, substantially reduces the delay of trains after rescheduling.

Microgrid energy management system for smart home using multi-agent system

This paper proposes a multi-agent system for energy management in a microgrid for smart home applications, the microgrid comprises a photovoltaic source, battery energy storage, electrical loads, and an energy management system (EMS) based on smart agents. The microgrid can be connected to the grid or operating in island mode. All distributed sources are implemented using MATLAB/Simulink to simulate a dynamic model of each electrical component. The agent proposed can interact with each other to find the best strategy for energy management using the java agent development framework (JADE) simulator. Furthermore, the proposed agent framework is also validated through a different case study, the efficiency of the proposed approach to schedule local resources and energy management for microgrid is analyzed. The simulation results verify the efficacy of the proposed approach using Simulink/JADE co-simulation.

Agent-Based Data Extraction in Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an active and important research discipline in which molecular data is exponentially growing in complex nature. Because of the substantial research in this field, researchers are faced with critical issues such as bandwidth, storage, and complexity in order to retrieve molecular data. It becomes very difficult to conduct research using low computational devices such as Internet of things and sensors. We are employing migration of the agent technique to decrease network traffic and to mitigate the client’s limited resource problem by utilizing server-side resources to perform large-scale computation. Our proposed solution does not necessitate additional storage or processing power on the client’s side which makes it cost effective. In the proposed solution, (i) an agent visits service provider containing biological data, say sequences requested by the client, (ii) agent fetches the required data, and on the server side it will manipulate the data, and (iii) returns along with the required results to its source platform. Thus, it solves the bandwidth, storage, and computational issues without involving the low resources of the client. For the proof of concept, Java Agent Development (JADE) framework is used as an implementation tool and the results are compared with Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). It is important to note that our findings reveal that our strategy saves the user up to 16.25% of average time with respect to bandwidth. On the other hand, our approach takes 46.82% less time than the other with respect to data that the agent carries. In addition to the previous contributions, our approach acts as a mashup, to collect data in different format from several service providers, and converts it in any required format. Thus, it solves the problem of complexity hidden in the nature of the data to increase the researchers’ productivity.

Development and implementation of multi-agent systems for demand response aggregators in an industrial context

Demand Response (DR) mechanisms are an important pillar in the transition to a bigger share of renewable energy in the power grid. To utilize DR, industrial companies can offer load flexibility at DR markets by cooperating with DR aggregators. Numerous studies promote the use of multi-agent systems (MAS) in this domain, however there is a lack of actual implementations and real world adaption. The literature has identified several reasons for this. These include research that often focuses on a high level of abstraction, the assumption of homogeneous structures for the use of agents, and insufficient tools and solutions for industrial deployment. To help DR aggregators use MAS in their existing virtual power plants, this paper presents a MAS that enables a step-by-step switch to agent technology and enables them to implement the solutions developed by the research community to improve the management of their systems. The proposed technical implementation on standard industrial equipment and the required interfaces to flexibility provider and DR aggregator are derived from the German DR market requirements. A simulation of the MAS implemented on a laboratory setup via the Java Agent DEvelopment Framework will be presented. This should provide a foundation for the transition to real world adaption in the future, which will then be discussed to show the benefits and drawbacks of this solution.

Anonymous and lightweight secure authentication protocol for mobile Agent system

Recently mobile agent technology used in intelligent systems, cloud computing and IOT. However using mobile agents in distributed environment makes them facing several security threats. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authentication protocol to overcome the security problem, and to provide a secure and anonymous mobile agent system. Our protocol is based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and fulfill all security requirements. For the validation of our security protocol, we used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool using HLPSL language. Furthermore, we used Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) to implement and simulate the proposed scheme. Finally, the paper presents the security analysis and comparison with well-known and significant related protocols in secure communication.

A multi-agent system for distribution network restoration in future smart grids

A main feature of future smart grids is their self-healing capability, which allows fault location, isolation and service restoration to be done automatically. Restoration is a combinatorial non-linear optimization problem for which conventional mathematical programming techniques and heuristic methods become computationally very costly. This paper proposes a decentralized restoration method that avoids the computational burden of fully centralized optimization techniques while still providing good solutions and avoiding single points of failure. By pre-calculating the amount of power that can be transferred from other feeders without violating their limits, restoration within the outage area is converted into a binary integer linear optimization problem which can be easily solved. To prove its effectiveness, different case scenarios were tested on 14-bus and 70-bus systems. The multi-agent system was implemented in JAVA Agent Development Framework (JADE) and MATLAB was employed for the main algorithms within each agent. The outcomes were compared to those of previously proposed centralized and decentralized approaches, proving that the method proposed shows better computational efficiency than the centralized approach and better results than the decentralized approach. Therefore, the proposed algorithm provides an overall improved solution.

Real-Time Energy Management for DC Microgrids Using Artificial Intelligence

Microgrids are defined as an interconnection of several renewable energy sources in order to provide the load power demand at any time. Due to the intermittence of renewable energy sources, storage systems are necessary, and they are generally used as a backup system. Indeed, to manage the power flows along the entire microgrid, an energy management strategy (EMS) is necessary. This paper describes a microgrid energy management system, which is composed of solar panels and wind turbines as renewable sources, Li-ion batteries, electrical grids as backup sources, and AC/DC loads. The proposed EMS is based on the maximum extraction of energy from the renewable sources, by making them operate under Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) mode; both of those MPPT algorithms are implemented with a multi-agent system (MAS). In addition, management of the stored energy is performed through the optimal control of battery charging and discharging using artificial neural network controllers (ANNCs). The main objective of this system is to maintain the power balance in the microgrid and to provide a configurable and a flexible control for the different scenarios of all kinds of variations. All the system’s components were modeled in MATLAB/Simulink, the MAS system was developed using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE), and Multi-Agent Control using Simulink with Jade extension (MACSIMJX) was used to insure the communication between Simulink and JADE.

Energy trading and control of islanded DC microgrid using multi-agent systems

The energy sector is experiencing a revolution that is fuelled by a multitude of factors. Among them are the aging grid system, the need for cleaner energy and the increasing demands on energy sector. The demand-response program is an advanced feature in smart grid that strives to match suppliers to their demands using price-based and incentive programs. The objective of the work is to analyse the performance of the load shedding technique using dynamic pricing algorithm. The system was designed using multi-agent system (MAS) for a DC microgrid capable of real-time monitoring and controlling of power using price-based demand-response program. As a proof of concept, the system was implemented using intelligent physical agents, Java Agent Development Framework (JADE), and agent simulation platform (REPAST) with two residential houses (non-critical loads) and one hospital (critical load). The architecture has been implemented using embedded devices, relays, and sensors to control the operations of load shedding and energy trading in residential areas that have no access to electricity. The measured results show that the system can shed the load with the latency of less than 600 ms, and energy cost saving with an individual houses by 80% of the total cost with 2USD per day. The outcome of the studies demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed multi-agent approach for real-time operation of a microgrid and the implementation of demand-response program.

Multi-Agent based Capital Market Management System: A Distributed Framework for Trading and Regulation

Stock Market plays a vital role in the economy of every nation. Having a transparent market may boost the confidence of not only stock brokers but also that of investors. One of the major problems that make investors to shy away from the market is lack of transparency. Another Problem which affect the market regulators is the lack of a system that enable them to check for compliance easily. In this work, an agent based distributed framework is presented. The idea behind the proposed system is that having one system that will serve all the market stake holders will guaranty strict compliance to the market rules, easier to manage and difficult manipulate by the market operators. The implementation of the proposed system followed Multi-Agent Software Engineering (MaSE) Methodology. The evaluation of the system show that, the distributed system developed using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) is capable of addressing problems of reliability, compliance and transparency.

A Multi-Agent System for Ubiquitous Learning for Hospital Education

Healthcare information systems (HIS) have become an important area of research due to ever-increasing healthcare costs to the national economy. Many recent technological developments such as mobile technology and cloud computing have profoundly affected the current state of HIS and further facilitated the developments of ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous learning systems (ULS). The authors propose a multi-agent system for ubiquitous learning (MASUL) to facilitate various learning tasks. They use JADE (Java agent development framework) for developing the multi-agent system. MASUL provides a series of functionalities that can be used by the patients and clinicians. The system simplifies the mechanisms to access learning information via mobile devices, and it also facilitates the learning-teaching process centered on the physical surroundings of the user.

Multi-agent-based hybrid peer-to-peer system for distributed information retrieval

With the increasingly huge amount of data located in various databases and the need for users to access them, distributed information retrieval (DIR) has been at the core of the preoccupations of a number of researchers. Indeed, numerous DIR systems and architectures have been proposed including the broker-based architecture. Moreover, providing DIR with more flexibility and adaptability has led researchers thinking to build DIR with software agents. Thus, this research proposes a design and an implementation of a novel system based on the broker-based architecture and the peer-to-peer (P2P) network called broker-based P2P network. The proposed architecture is implemented with a multi-agent system (MAS) where the main agent playing the role of the broker, receives query from a peer agent and forwards them to other peer agents each with their index and resources. Upon completing retrieval process at each peer agent, results are directly sent to the peer agent that initiated the query without using the broker agent. Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) is used to implement the agents and, for experiments, TERRIER (TERabyte RetRIEveR) is extended and used as the search engine to retrieve the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) collections dataset notably TREC-6. The peer agent that originated the query progressively collects results coming from other peer agents, normalises and merges them and then proceeds with re-ranking. For normalisation, MinMax and Sum that are unsupervised normalisation methods are used.

Agent-Based Coordinated Control of Power Electronic Converters in a Microgrid

This paper presents the implementation of an agent-based architecture suitable for the coordination of power electronic converters in stand-alone microgrids. To this end, a publish-subscribe agent architecture was utilized as a distributed microgrid control platform. Over a distributed hash table (DHT) searching overlay, the publish-subscribe architecture was identified based on a numerical analysis as a scalable agent-based technology for the distributed real-time coordination of power converters in microgrids. The developed framework was set up to deploy power-sharing distributed optimization algorithms while keeping a deterministic time period of a few tens of milliseconds for a system with tens of converters and when multiple events might happen concurrently. Several agents participate in supervisory control to regulate optimum power-sharing for the converters. To test the design, a notional shipboard system, including several converters, was used as a case study. Results of implementing the agent-based publish-subscribe control system using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) are presented.

An Efficient Agent Based Data Management Method of NoSQL Environments for Health Care Applications.

Background: As medical knowledge is continuously expanding and diversely located, Health Information Technology (HIT) applications are proposed as a good prospect for improving not only the efficiency and the effectiveness but also the quality of healthcare services delivery. The technologies expected to shape such innovative HIT architectures include: Mobile agents (Mas) and NoSQL technologies. Mobile agents provide an inherent way of tackling distributed problems of accessing heterogeneous and spatially diverse data sources. NoSQL technology gains ground for the development of scalable applications with non-static and open data schema from complex and diverse sources. Methods and Design: This paper conducts a twofold study: It attempts a literature review of the applications based on the mobile agent (MA) and NoSQL technologies for healthcare support services. Subsequently, a pilot system evaluates the NoSQL technology against the relational one within a distributed environment based on mobile agents for information retrieval. Its objective is to study the feasibility of developing systems that will employ ontological data representation and task implementation through mobile agents towards flexible and transparent health data monitoring. Results and Discussion: The articles studied focus on applying mobile agents for patient support and healthcare services provision thus as to make a positive contribution to the treatment of chronic diseases. In addition, attention is put on the design of platform neutral techniques for clinical data gathering and dissemination over NoSQL. The experimental environment was based on the Apache Jena Fuseki NoSQL server and the JAVA Agent DEvelopment Framework -JADE agent platform. The results reveal that the NoSQL implementation outperforms the standard relational one.

Development of a Mas Based Distributed Intelligent Control and Fault Control Strategy for Microgrid

The technology of Multi-Agent-System (MAS) has a lot of attractive qualities such as proactivity, flexibility, reactivity and sociality. It is extensively established as the technology platform for implementing efficient and effective processes of management and automation within a microgrid platform. This paper presents the design and development of the microgrid system using MATLAB-Simulink software with multi-agent system platform. The JAVA agent development framework (JADE) is used for implementing MAS software. MAS consist of the three agents are distributed energy source agent, load agent and control agent. The distributed agent used to monitor and control the power level of the different energy sources in the microgrid. The load agent used to monitor the power consumption level of the consumer. The control agent used to control the power flow from energy source to load and also used for restructuring the power network based on abnormality of the system. To test the effectiveness of the developed system, simulation studies are carried out for different operating conditions of the microgrid system. From the test result, the developed system outperform in all aspect.

Enabling scalable and fault-tolerant multi-agent systems by utilizing cloud-native computing

Multi-agent systems (MAS) represent a distributed computing paradigm well suited to tackle today’s challenges in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). Both share many similarities such as the interconnection of distributed devices and their cooperation. The combination of MAS and IoT would allow the transfer of the experience gained in MAS research to the broader range of IoT applications. The key enabler for utilizing MAS in the IoT is the ability to build large-scale and fault-tolerant MASs since IoT concepts comprise possibly thousands or even millions of devices. However, well known multi-agent platforms (MAP), e. g., Java Agent DE-velopment Framework (JADE), are not able to deal with these challenges. To this aim, we present a cloud-native Multi-Agent Platform (cloneMAP) as a modern MAP based on cloud-computing techniques to enable scalability and fault-tolerance. A microservice architecture is used to implement it in a distributed way utilizing the open-source container orchestration system Kubernetes. Thereby, bottlenecks and single-points of failure are conceptually avoided. A comparison with JADE via relevant performance metrics indicates the massively improved scalability. Furthermore, the implementation of a large-scale use case verifies cloneMAP’s suitability for IoT applications. This leads to the conclusion that cloneMAP extends the range of possible MAS applications and enables the integration with IoT concepts.

A Secure Trust Method for Multi-Agent System in Smart Grids Using Blockchain

This paper proposes a blockchain based trust management method for agents in a multi-agent system (MAS). In this work, three objectives are achieved: trust, cooperation and privacy. The trust of agents depends on the credibility of trust evaluators, which is verified using the proposed methods of trust distortion, consistency and reliability. To enhance the cooperation between agents, a tit-3-for-tat (T3FT) repeated game strategy is developed. The strategy is more forgiving than the existing tit-for-tat (TFT) strategy. It encourages cheating agents to re-establish their trust by cooperating for three consecutive rounds of play. Also, a proof-of-cooperation consensus protocol is proposed to improve agents' cooperation while creating and validating blocks. The privacy of agents is preserved in this work using the publicly verifiable secret sharing mechanism. The proposed methods are implemented using MATLAB R2018a while the MAS is simulated using Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE). Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed work. From the simulation results, the proposed trust method outperforms an existing fuzzy logic trust method in terms of detecting the cheating behavior of agents in the system. Besides, the proposed T3FT strategy is effective as compared to the existing tit-for-2-tat and TFT strategies in the literature. Moreover, the security analysis of the proposed method is performed. The analysis shows that the proposed work is safe from bad-mouthing and on-off trust related attacks.

Multi-Agents for Microgrids

Microgrid systems are built to integrate a generation mix of solar and wind renewable energy resources that are generally intermittent in nature. This paper presents a novel decentralized multi-agent system to securely operate microgrids in real-time while maintaining generation, load balance. Agents provide a normal operation in a grid-connected mode and a contingency operation in an islanded mode for fault handling. Fault handling is especially critical in microgrid operation to simulate possible contingencies and microgrid outages in a real-world scenario. A robust agent design has been implemented using MATLAB-Simulink and Java Agent Development Framework technologies to simulate microgrids with load management and distributed generators control. The microgrid of the German Jordanian University has been used for simulation for Summer and Winter photovoltaic generation and load profiles. The results show agent capabilities to operate microgrid in real-time and its ability to coordinate and adjust generation and load. In a simulated fault incident, agents coordinate and adjust to a normal operation in 0.012 seconds, a negligible time for microgrid restoration. This clearly shows that the multi-agent system is a viable solution to operate MG in real-time.