Belgacom, Broadcom, BT, CSELT, France Telecom, Portugal Telecom, Telefonica, TILAB
Description
MESSAGE (Methodology for Engineering Systems of Software Agents) is a methodology for developing multi-agent systems. It is a collaborative project conducted by EURESCOM, an institute for collaborative R&D in telecommunications.
While most current software engineering methodologies are designed for an object-oriented approach, MESSAGE is specifically designed for developing agent solutions. MESSAGE aims to extend existing methodologies by allowing them to support agent oriented software engineering. By using such concepts as goal, task, role and interaction from analysis through design and implementation, the developer is able to focus on and document the specific concerns of agent functionality, leading to quick, robust solutions.
Istituto di Calcolo e Reti ad Alte Prestazioni - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Description
PASSI (a Process for Agent Societies Specification and Implementation) is a step-by-step requirement-to-code methodology for designing and developing multi-agent societies integrating design models and concepts from both OO software engineering and artificial intelligence approaches using the UML notation. The models and phases of PASSI encompass anthropomorphic representation of system requirements, social viewpoint, solution architecture, code production and reuse, and deployment configuration supporting mobility of agents.
The design process with PASSI is supported by PTK (PASSI ToolKit) which is composed of an add-in for Rational Rose and a tool for reusing patterns of agents.
ZEUS is an Open Source agent system entirely implemented in Java, developed by BT Labs and can be considered a toolkit for constructing collaborative multi-agent applications. Zeus provides support for generic agent functionality and has sophisticated support for the planning and scheduling of an agent's actins. Moreover, Zeus provides facilities for supporting agent communications using FIPA ACL as the message transport and TCP/IP sockets as the delivery mechanism. Zeus also provides facilities for building agents in a visual environment and support for redirecting agent behavior. The Zeus approach to planning and scheduling involves representing goals and actions using descriptions that include the resources they require and the pre-conditions they need to be met in order to function. This allows goals to be represented using a chain of actions that have to b fulfilled before the goal can be met. This action chain is built up using a process of backwards chaining.
Environment, minimal configuration
As ZEUS uses the latest Swing GUI components it will run on any platform that has had a JDK1.2 (aka JDK2) virtual machine installed. Each host machine should also be capable of TCP/IP communication, but there is no need for any middleware services to be installed. So far ZEUS has been successfully tested on Windows 95/98/NT4 and Solaris platforms.
