Scale-up and performance studies of three agent platforms

With maturing technology agents are now a viable choice for distributed computing, also for systems with requirements on dependability and scalability. Agent platforms provide common services to applications developed as agents. Given the abundance of available platforms it is not easy to select an agent platform given a set of applications requirements. Evaluations of relevant properties of agent platforms are therefore needed, but unfortunately few up-to-date evaluations exist. In this paper we introduce and evaluate the three recent agent platforms JADE, Tryllian and SAP. Focus of the evaluation is the important properties of performance, security and scalability. We conclude that all platforms perform very well, but that platform architecture heavily influences the performance.