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I'm starting my thesis on Agents and Smart Objects interaction and I'd like to know what's in the future for JADE, the Java Agent framework. I find the whole concept of agents, programmable behaviors, federations and their help in solving Artificial Intelligence problems very interesting but will it always be an academic field, like Haskell? What's being done with JADE?

Robert Harvey
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Geraldo Nascimento
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  • I'm interested in the answer to this as well. There seem to be far more "agent frameworks" than actual agents, presumably since no one really knows how to create intelligent agents all that well. – Cerin Oct 10 '10 at 00:08

2 Answers2

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I created a system for my PhD - using JADE as the framework - where agents played music with human musicians. There's a bit of a write up (and a link to the thesis) at http://www.mo-seph.com/academic/musicalagents

In the end, I didn't use a lot of JADE, and found it quite heavyweight for the kind of work I was doing. The communications library was useful (if a bit hard work) and the message queuing side of it worked OK. However, I quickly found that most of the behaviour I wanted to implement needed to be so heavily customised that the JADE framework only really supported the transfer of information.

I think the usefulness of the framework depends hugely on what the question is. It seems that a lot of the usefulness of JADE was around it's links to the FIPA agent communication languages (http://www.fipa.org/) and the communications infrastructure in general. If that's what you're interested in, then it might be quite useful. If you're more concerned with the intelligence in individual agents, it might be a useful framework, but it won't help much with the design of the intelligence.

mo-seph
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    I concur that JADE's strength lies in its communication services, I developed a simple coin game where AI players subscribed to the game service, received updates and then sent their choices, all using FIPA specified subscription services. Their actually AI was lacking, but that's not really what JADE is about, it seems. – Geraldo Nascimento Oct 14 '10 at 15:09
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Systems like JADE, Aglets etc. are "containers" as opposed to libraries.

This means that if you want to use some aspects of code mobility/mobile objects/mobile agents in your application, you basically have to design your application around these frameworks. I think this limits the applicability quite a bit.

Personally I think the ability to send mobile objects/mobile agents to remote machines is generally quite useful though. It's a very powerful idea and has applications for sure in grid computing, but also applications in areas where RPC is used right now.

So given this idea I wrote Mobility-RPC which is a way to avail of code mobility in any application, much like you would use RPC.

npgall
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