Engineering JIAC Multi-Agent Systems (Demonstration)

The development of high quality software is considered to be extremely di cult. In fact, it has been argued that such endeavours are one of the most di cult construction tasks that humans undertake [2]. Contemporary IT-infrastructures facilitate the need for distributed applications—a system design which can be implemented with Agent Oriented Software Engineering [2]. Yet, despite the requirement for distributed systems and despite the availability of frameworks, methodologies and tool suites that support the development of distributed applications, there are only few attempts to use agent technology for commercial or industrial applications. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, though, analyses [6, 7, 9] show that there are several factors that may foster industrial adoption of agent technology. These factors include: awareness for the need for agent technology, compliance with standards, reasonable costs, scalability and performance, stability and robustness, extensibility, mature methodologies and tool support, and a comprehensive user documentation. To facilitate the industrial adoption of agent technology, we developed the Java Intelligent Agent Componentware, or JIAC [4]. JIAC supports a comprehensive set of standards, ensures reliable applications, supports custom extensions, and provides a whole set of user friendly and well documented tools for the design, implementation, deployment, and monitoring of multi-agent systems. Agent frameworks with a focus on industrial requirements, however, find it difficult to gain foothold in the realm of research where other factors determine their level of acceptance. The aim of JIAC is to show that industrial requirements and research needs can be combined in one solution.