Agent Construction Tools(4)

Swarm
Swarm Develpment Group
Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulation of complex systems. Swa
rm is intended as a tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines, especial
ly artificial life. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of colle
ctions of concurrently interacting agents: with this architecture, we can impl
ement a large variety of agent based models. The primary platforms for which S
warm is supported are Solaris running on a Sun Sparc, GNU/Linux running on an
Intel 386 and up and Windows NT. However, they currently have users running Sw
arm on more exotic platforms such as GNU/Linux on a PowerPC, HP/UX, DEC Alpha
and SGI.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Topia Personal Agents
Topia Ventures
Topia Personal Agents are a class of software that performs tasks on your beha
lf. The Topia Personal Agent fulfills requests by finding, acquiring, filterin
g and delivering information, negotiating for services and products, collabora
ting with other agents to complete tasks and monitoring agent activities. The
Topia Personal Agents are goal-centered and autonomous. Once the agent has rec
eived a goal, it makes decisions to carry out tasks in the best possible way.
The Topia Personal Agent performs these actions freeing you to engage in other
 activities.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

UMPRS Agent
Intelligent Reasoning Systems
UMPRS is a Belief-Desire-Intention agent architecture based upon the Procedura
l Reasoning System (PRS) of Georgeff, Ingrand, Rao, Lansky, and others. Unlike
 many "agents" available today which are useful in very restricted domains, UM
PRS is applicable to nearly any application domain. It supports top-down, goal

-based reasoning and selects goals and plans based on maximal priority. Source
 code and documentation are available for download at the UMPRS website.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Via
Kinetoscope
The Via System is written entirely in Java and allows developers to build inte
lligent agent features into existing applications, Web sites and intranets. Vi
a contains tools for creating agent tasks, logic, and user interfaces. It also
 includes advanced features for supporting system-wide distribution, persisten
ce, and scalability.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Voyager
Object Space
Voyager is a 100% Java agent-enhanced Object Request Broker (ORB). It combines
 the power of mobile autonomous agents and remote method invocation with compl
ete CORBA support and comes complete with distributed services such as directo
ry, persistence, and publish subscribe multicast. Voyager allows Java programm
ers to quickly and easily create sophisticated network applications using both
 traditional and agent-enhanced distributed programming techniques.

Voyager uses regular Java message syntax to construct remote objects, send the
m messages,and move them between applications. Voyager allows agents (i.e, aut
onomous objects) to move themselves and continue executing as they move. In th
is way, agents can act independently on the behalf of a client, even if the cl
ient is disconnected or unavailable. This approach is particularly valuable in
 any type of workflow or resource automation.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Research Projects
The Agent Building Shell: Programming Cooperative Enterprise Agents
Enterprise Integration Laboratory
University of Toronto
This project is developing an Agent Building Shell that provides several reusa
ble layers of languages and services for building agent systems: coordination

数据挖掘研究院

and communication languages, description logic-based knowledge management, coo
perative information distribution, organization modeling and conflict manageme
nt. The approach is being used to develop multiagent applications in the area
of manufacturing enterprise supply chain integration.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Agent Factory
University College Dublin, Ireland
Agent Factory is an agent prototyping environment. It features the following:


Written in Smalltalk-80 (supports Mac, PC, UNIX)
Distribution through TCP/IP
Web interface provided
Agents are reactive, social, pro-active, autonomous and intentional
Agents may be mobile
Agent model allows configuration of:
mental state architecture (the developer is free to construct any mental state
 architecture; however, the inclusion of beliefs and commitments is expected)

数据挖掘研究院

agent communication language (default is Teanga ACL, but KQML and FIPA ACL sup
ported)
intentional reasoner (commitment management system)
Agent designs require initial mental state, perceptors, actuators

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

D'Agents
Dartmouth University
A mobile-agent system called D'Agents is under development at Dartmouth Colleg
e. The ultimate goal of D'Agents is to support applications that require the r
etrieval, organization and presentation of distributed information in arbitrar
y networks. Some of the research areas are:

-Security mechanisms
-Support for mobile and partially connected computers Navigation network sensi
ng and resource discovery tools
-Automatic indexing, retrieval and clustering techniques for text and other do
cuments

D'Agents is used in several information-retrieval and workflow applications.




------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Agent Tcl
Dartmouth University
Agent Tcl is a tool for developing transportable agent systems. The transporta
ble agents are created using the Tool Command Language (Tcl). Tcl is an embedd
able scripting language that is highly portable, highly popular and freely ava
ilable.

The agents migrate from machine to machine using the jump command. Execution r
esumes on the destination machine at the statement immediately after the jump
is completed. Modifications to the Tcl core allow the capture of the complete
internal state of an executing script. Migrating agents are encrypted and auth
enticated using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). Access restrictions are imposed on
the agent based on its authenticated identity. Safe Tcl enforces the access re
strictions.

In addition to migration, Agent Tcl supports message passing. Agents can clone

数据挖掘研究院

 themselves and the system provides rudimentary security features. Each agent
on a particular machine has a unique integer ID and a unique symbolic name. Ag
ents specify a recipient agent by specifying the recipient's machine and eithe
r the recipient's integer ID or the recipient's symbolic name.

The research project is addressing issues involving debugging, privacy, securi
ty, mobile agent management, networking resources and performance. Agent Tcl h
as two components: a modified Tcl interpreter that execute Tcl agents and a se
rver which runs on every machine that can receive a transportable agent.  


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Architecture type-based Development Environment (ADE)
University of Potsdam
Software agents and agent systems are modelled object-orientedly using the lat
est findings of software architecture. This approach describes a software arch
itecture as a system of components whose interactions are realised via connect
ors. With the architecture-based methodology, theoretical fundamentals for the
 implementation of computer-independent platforms for agent programming have b
een found.

Existing platforms, such as IBM Aglets or Objectspace Voyager, do not support
an architecture-based approach and environment when developing agent applicati
on systems. As a result these platforms miss the explicit modeling of agent in
teractions, or allow only a very limited number of property classes. The advan
tages of a substantiated methodology of an architecture type-based approach ar
e lost while transforming them onto existing platforms.

To map the mental models and systems onto agent platforms, an architecture typ
e-based agent development environment for the modeling, analysis and construct
ion of agent application systems for various agent platforms called ADE - "Arc
hitecture type-based Development Environment" is being developed.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

Ascape
The Brookings Institution
Ascape is a software framework for developing and analyzing agent-based models
. In Ascape, agent objects exist within scapes; collections of agents such as
arrays and lattices. These scapes are themselves agents, so that typical Ascap
e models are made up of "collections of collections" of agents. Scapes provide
 a context for agent interaction and sets of rules that govern agent behavior.
 Ascape manages graphical views and collection of statistics for scapes and pr
ovides mechanisms for controlling and altering parameters for scape models.