An Agent Infrastructure to Build and Evaluate Multi-Agent Systems: The Java Agent Framework and Multi-Abent System Simulator

In this paper, we describe our agent framework and address the issues we have encountered designing a suitable environmental space for evaluating the coordination and adaptive qualities of multi-agent systems. Our research direction is to develop a framework allowing us to build different type of agents rapidly, and to facilitate the addition of new technology. The underlying technology of our Java Agent Framework (JAF) uses a component-based design. We will present in this paper, the reasons and the design choices we made to build a complete system to evaluate the coordination and adaptive qualities of multi-agent systems.

[1]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Quantitative Modeling of Complex Computational Task Environments , 1993, AAAI.

[2]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Criteria-directed task scheduling , 1998, Int. J. Approx. Reason..

[3]  B. C. Horling.  A Reusable Component Architecture for Agent Construction TITLE2 , 1998 .

[4]  Keith S. Decker,et al.  Task environment centered simulation , 1998 .

[5]  Hyacinth S. Nwana,et al.  ZEUS: A Toolkit for Building Distributed Multiagent Systems , 1999, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[6]  Bryan Horling,et al.  Using Self-Diagnosis to Adapt Organizational Structures TITLE2: , 1999 .

[7]  Bryan Horling,et al.  A multi-agent system for intelligent environment control , 1998 .

[8]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Implementing soft real-time agent control , 2001, AGENTS '01.

[9]  Victor Lesser,et al.  Quantitative Modeling of Complex Environments , 1993 .

[10]  Nelson Minar,et al.  The Swarm Simulation System: A Toolkit for Building Multi-Agent Simulations , 1996 .

[11]  Victor Lesser,et al.  Coordination Assistance for Mixed Human and Computational Agents , 1995 .

[12]  Paul R. Cohen,et al.  Benchmarks, Test Beds, Controlled Experimentation, and the Design of Agent Architectures , 1993, AI Mag..

[13]  Martin Andersson,et al.  Leveled Commitment Contracts with Myopic and Strategic Agents , 1998, AAAI/IAAI.

[14]  Victor Lesser,et al.  Criteria-Directed Heuristic Task Scheduling TITLE2: , 1997 .

[15]  Victor R. Lesser,et al.  Generalizing the Partial Global Planning Algorithm , 1992, Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst..

[16]  Victor Lesser,et al.  Environment Centered Analysis and Design of Coordination Mechanisms , 1996 .

[17]  K. Suzanne Barber,et al.  Dynamic adaptive autonomy in multi-agent systems , 2000, J. Exp. Theor. Artif. Intell..

[18]  Michael J. Prietula,et al.  Simulating organizations: computational models of institutions and groups , 1998 .

[19]  Richard T Lacoss.  Distributed Sensor Network , 1983 .