Intermodal Mobility Assistance for Megacities - Smart Information Systems: Computational Intelligence for Real-Life Applications - page 343

Fig. 13.1 JIAC basic
concepts and their structural
relationships

AgentBean

1..*

1

Agent

1..*

1

AgentNode

1..*

1

JIAC Application

principles of service oriented architectures. In order to achieve this, JIAC includes
dedicated concepts that cover the whole range, from single service components to a
whole application. These concepts, depicted in Fig. 13.1 , are as follows:

• The AgentBean is the central building block of JIAC agents and applications. All

other concepts and elements are built from this. An AgentBean is basically a Java
class that can be plugged into an agent.

• An Agent in JIAC is an autonomous entity dedicated to a particular role. The

capabilities of the agent are implemented with AgentBeans and can be made
accessible to other agents as services.

• An AgentNode is a runtime container that holds and manages all agents that

are hosted on a single computer. The AgentNode mainly provides management
and infrastructure functions and is responsible for managing access to physical
resources.

• A JIAC Application is the sum of all AgentNodes that can communicate with each

other. Thus, this constitutes a physically distributed environment that encompasses
all agents that are able to interact with each other.

13.2.2 The IMA System and Its Architecture

In a nutshell, the functionality of the IMA system is to propose tailored routes between
one or more locations in a major city.
In doing so, IMA accesses a large pool of information channels and services in
order to outperform, in terms of quality, available solutions. As an example, consider