Flexible and Robust Protocol-Based Interaction between Agents in Open Systems
There has been much discussion of the importance of software agents for supporting a wide variety of
interaction between businesses and individuals over the internet. Important applications include ecommerce
and b2b applications. For the potential of software agents to be realised in open systems, issues of flexibility,
robustness, and extensibility are critical. This project addresses the development of flexible and powerful
mechanisms for interaction, within the context of FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents)
standards. The project uses Agentcities as a test bed, enabling us to build on and co-operate with a
large European project starting mid 2001.
Agentcities
Agent Cities is an international project developed to provide an
infrastructure for exploring issues in open agent systems.
The agent cities site can be found at http://www.agentcities.org.
Being able to deploy realistic and useful agent-based services is one of the key factors for the success of Agentcities effort. Our project has been very fortunate to have generous offers from organisations and companies to provide us with a rich set of live data. We would like to express our sincere appreciation for their offers and acknowledge their contributions!
Joshua Hutchison and Michael Winikoff.
Flexibility and Robustness in Agent Interaction Protocols.
To appear in Challenges in Open Agent Systems, workshop at AAMAS'02.
Joshua Hutchison.
Flexibility and Robustness in Agent Interaction Protocols.
Presentation at Agents-VIC 2002.
Kenichi Yoshimura.
FIPA JACK: A plugin for JACK Intelligent Agents.
Technical report, RMIT University
(pdf).
Lavindra de Silva (supervised by Michael Winikoff and Wei Liu).
Extending Agents by Transmitting Protocols in Open Systems.
Technical report (honours thesis), RMIT University.
Kenichi Yoshimura, Lin Padgham, and Wei Liu.
An Infrastrucutre for Agent Collaboration in Open Environments.
To appear in Challenges in Open Agent Systems, workshop at AAMAS'03.
Kenichi Yoshimura
An Infrastrucutre for Agent Collaboration in Open Environments.
Presentation at Agents-VIC, May 2003
(ppt).
FIPA JACK
Now we have developed an extension of JACK Intelligent Agents
called FIPA JACK which provides a plug-in for JACK to enable building
of FIPA compliant JACK intelligent agents. It provides fundamental
requirements of the FIPA standards such as Agent Management System
(AMS), Directory Facilitator (DF) and Message Transport Service
(MTS). Furthermore, it provides FIPAAgent base class which makes your
agents ready to send/receive messages to/from other FIPA compliant
agents.
It is developed for use with JACK Intelligent Agents, an intelligent
agent development environment, available from Agent Oriented
Software. Research licenses for JACK are available and an evaluation version is
available free.
It is available for download here!. The package contains the FIPA JACK extension (a file called fipa-jack.jar) and also contains a directory for the documentation. The directory contains a pdf file which presents a general overview of the package, and gives a simple example of how to use the package. The directory also contains JavaDoc of the APIs available in the package. Note: This package was compiled with JACK version 4.0. You may have problems with older versions of JACK (Please let us know if you want to use older versions of JACK).
Please note that this package is still under constant development! This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. We are expecting to make changes frequently, and also fix any bugs which we may find in the future. We appreciate if you could tell us your comments about the package, improvements you expect, bugs, etc etc. Please contact Flexible Protocols Project Team!! We also greatly appreciate if you could send us email to let us know why and how you use the package.
