Rule Engines and Agent-Based Systems

Expert systems are successfully applied to a number of domains. Often built on generic rulebased systems, they can also exploit optimized algorithms. On the other side, being based on loosely coupled components and peer to peer infrastructures for asynchronous messaging, multi-agent systems allow code mobility, adaptability, easy of deployment and reconfiguration, thus fitting distributed and dynamic environments. Also, they have good support for domain specific ontologies, an important feature when modelling human experts’ knowledge. The possibility of obtaining the best features of both technologies is concretely demonstrated by the integration of JBoss Rules, a rule engine efficiently implementing the Rete-OO algorithm, into JADE, a FIPA-compliant multi-agent system. (Figure 1)