Jadex: A Short Overview

Nowadays a whole bunch of different agent platforms exists that aim to support the software engineer in developing multi-agent systems. Nevertheless most of these platforms concentrate on specific objectives and therefore cannot address all important aspects of agent technology equally well. A broad distinction in this field can be made between middlewareand reasoning-oriented systems. The first category is mostly concerned with FIPA-related issues like interoperability, security and maintainability whereas the latter one emphasizes rationality and goal-directedness. In this paper the Jadex agent framework is presented, which supports reasoning by exploiting the BDI model and is realised as an extension to the widely used JADE middleware platform.