An autonomous agent development environment for engineering applications

Agent technology is playing an increasingly important role in developing distributed, intelligent, and collaborative engineering applications. The innate difficulties of interoperation between heterogeneous agent communities and rapid development of multi-agent systems have motivated the emergence of FIPA specifications and the proliferation of multi-agent system platforms or toolkits that implement FIPA specifications. This paper presents a FIPA compliant multi-agent framework called Autonomous Agent Development Environment (AADE). Originating from the engineering fields, AADE can facilitate the rapid development of collaborative engineering applications (especially in engineering design and manufacturing fields) through the provision of reusable packages of agent level components and programming tools. An agent oriented engineering project on the development of a collaborative product design environment is implemented based on the facilities provided by AADE.