Brain Agent Frameworks

UserPreferences

The first agent framework we explored was FIPAOS. It is somewhat heavy-weight, relying on speech-act communication protocols and communication languages (acl), including a family of Semantic Languages (sl0, sl1,...). To become proficient in these would have required significant effort. No on saw enough payoff to proceed with this package or any other FIPA based package (e.g. Jade).

Another drawback of FIPAOS is the preference for using a GUI to start agents. It may be possible to start the initial agents without using a GUI, and have agents start other agents, but this does not seem to be part of the expected usage.

So we began to explore other agent packages.

The Cougaar package did not seem to require investment in speech-acts and semantic languages. However, Cougaar does require MySQL dayabase support. That is another learning experience for most of the people involved.

The DIET Agents package claims to be lightweight. It does not require speach-acts or any semantic language. No database either!

But, DIET 0.93 lacks facilities for discovering other agents. One can connect to a random agent, but one cannot get a list of all agents of a given type. DIET also has some security features that are not needed in our environment.

All of the Agent packages explored to-date have been implemented in Java. None of them have an active mail list.

Jade is an FIPA conforming agent framework. It has a more active user community than either FIPAOS or DIET. Both Jade and DIET use behavior plugins.

JADE does allow querying for all registered agents of a given type.

The FIPA architecture's messages have a "payload" that is text. One can use the payload to transport Java objects. But this requires additional code. Hopefully we will find an existing implementation.

JADE differs from FIPAOS in that it does not require a GUI to start agents. And JADE has an active mail list and user community.

See BrainAgentJade for additional JADE links 'n stuff.