Author :
Evans, Colin ; Rmeileh, S.A.
Author_Institution :
Fac. of Technol., Eng. & the Environ., Birmingham City Univ., Birmingham, UK
Abstract :
There is a growing interest in the potential of software agent technologies for building the next generation of advanced software systems that will help solving problems that require advanced user interactions and intensive collaborations. Despite this interest, software agents are not yet widespread due to many reasons, one of which is the heavy programming work that has to be done in order to create efficient and effective agent systems, particularly from the point of view of agents´ characteristics, such as autonomy and deliberation on one hand, and integration with other technologies and applications on the other. While several agent platforms implement the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture have been proposed, most of these platforms are implemented based on existing general purpose programming languages, e.g. Java. As a consequence, this prevents the use of advanced features of the underlying programming language and the integration with new technologies and paradigms that are essential for the development of enterprise applications. Due to these limitations of the existing platforms, a new BDI distributed agent platform design and implementation is proposed in this paper. The CloudNetBDI platform prototype is compliant with the specifications of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) and has been implemented in the .NET framework. The CloudNetBDI platform employs the BDI model as an internal reasoning engine for its agents. Furthermore, the CloudNetBDI platform provides an interface for developers to design and develop enriched, robust and autonomous BDI based distributed multi-agent systems.
Keywords :
cloud computing; inference mechanisms; network operating systems; programming languages; software agents; software architecture; .NET framework; BDI architecture; BDI based distributed multiagent system; BDI distributed agent platform design; BDI model; CloudNetBDI 1.0; CloudNetBDI platform prototype; FIPA compliant BDI agent platform; Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents; Java; advanced software system; agent characteristics; belief-desire-intention; enterprise application; general purpose programming language; intensive collaboration; internal reasoning engine; software agent technology; user interaction; Cognition; Collaboration; Computer architecture; Multi-agent systems; Programming; Prototypes; Software agents; Agent System; BDI; MAS; intelligent context-aware systems;
Conference_Titel :
Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2013 27th International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Barcelona
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4673-6239-9
Electronic_ISBN :
978-0-7695-4952-1
DOI :
10.1109/WAINA.2013.48