Developing multi-agent systems with a FIPA-compliant agent framework

To ease large-scale realization of agent applications there is an urgent need for frameworks, methodologies and toolkits that support the effective development of agent systems. Moreover, since one of the main tasks for which agent systems were invented is the integration between heterogeneous software, independently developed agents should be able to interact successfully. In this paper, we present JADE (Java Agent Development Environment), a software framework to build agent systems for the management of networked information resources in compliance with the FIPA specifications for inter-operable intelligent multi-agent systems. The goal of JADE is to simplify development while ensuring standard compliance through a comprehensive set of system services and agents. JADE can then be considered to be an agent middle-ware that implements an efficient agent platform and supports the development of multi-agent systems. It deals with all the aspects that are not peculiar to agent internals and that are independent of the applications, such as message transport, encoding and parsing, or agent life-cycle management. Copyright  2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.