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agent-oriented software development with application framework concepts and
exploit the advantages of both techniques.
In this paper, we present this approach. We start by describing our concept
(see Section 2), which we evaluate afterwards (see Section 3). Subsequently, we
compare our work to existing solutions (see Section 4) and finally, we wrap up
with a conclusion (see Section 5). This paper is based on the diploma thesis of
the first author [2].
2
Approach
The objective of our work was to facilitate interaction between user interfaces
and multi-agent systems (MAS) by integrating application frameworks into the
agent-oriented application development. When analysing related works, we were
able to identify two main directions. On the one hand, agents were used in com-
bination with existing frameworks. To make this approach work, the agents were
geared towards the respective framework. On the other hand, we identified so-
lutions with particular support for agent-oriented software development. These
solutions were usually restricted by the applied technology. As an example, con-
sider web-based approaches. Web orientation enables a standardised and easy
distribution of UIs and supports a large number of different (mobile) devices,
yet, the implementation is tied to web based programming languages as well as
to the unflexible request-response model. The main intention of our work, was
to counter such limitations.
We implemented our concept for the latest version of
JIAC V
,whichweintro-
duce in the following. Even though we made use of a particular agent framework
for our implementation, our concept is not limited to it, but can be applied to
many other agent platforms.
2.1 The Java Intelligent Agents Componentware (JIAC)
JIAC
is a Java based agent framework which has been developed within industry-
and government-funded projects at the
DAI-Labor
since 1998 [3]. In its latest
incarnation,
JIAC V
[6] combines agent technology, scalability and performance
and allows to execute hundreds of agents on a desktop computer. The modu-
lar architecture includes conformity to standards, extensibility, security mech-
anisms and combines service-oriented concepts with agent-oriented approaches.
Agents can be implemented using Java or the
JIAC Agent Description Language
(
JADL++
),
JIAC
's scripting language [6]. In
JIAC
, an agent's behaviour, its
capabilities and its functions are encapsulated by so called “AgentBeans”. The
entire development process is supported by a comprehensive set of tools.
2.2 HAI in a Nutshell
The Human Agent Interface (HAI) has been developed with the objective to fa-
cilitate interaction between user interfaces and multi-agent systems. We derived
