Agent Development Tools

This panel (and a corresponding paper track) sought to examine the state of the art (or lack thereof) in tools for developing agents and agent systems. In this context, ”tools” include complete agent programming environments, testbeds, environment simulators, component libraries, and specification tools. In the past few years, the field has gone from a situation where almost all implementations were created from scratch in general purpose programming languages, through the appearance of the first generally available public libraries (for example, the venerable Lockeed “KAPI” (KQML API) of the mid-90’s [9]), to full-blown GUI-supported development environments. For example, http://www.agentbuilder.com/AgentTools/ lists 25 commercial and 40 academic projects, many of which are publically available. The sheer number of projects brings up many questions beyond those related to the tools themselves, and we put the following to our panel members: