An integrated development environment for distributed multi-agent applications

This paper presents an Agent Development Environment (ADE) for building distributed multi-agent applications. ADE provides a predefined class hierarchy of agents and agent parts, an agent communications "middleware", and a graphical language for designing and developing agent behavior based on the Grafcet standard. In addition, ADE provides a distributed simulation environment to test agent-based applications, and a center to deploy agents on the network. In this paper we provide a brief overview of ADE and present two Adaptive Control applications developed with ADE.