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From Agent Factory

Agent Factory is a modular and extensible framework that provides comprehensive support for the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. It has been developed by researchers from PRISM Laboratory in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at University College Dublin. It is part of an ongoing research initiative that seeks to understand how agent technologies may be used to construct complex distributed systems in a diverse range of problem domains, including, mobile & ubiquitous computing, distributed sensor networks, social robotics, and augmented reality. Further details of some of the projects that have made use of Agent Factory can be found here.

Agent Factory is implemented in Java, and as can be seen in the above schematic, it is broadly decomposed into three parts:

• Run-Time Environment (RTE): A standards compliant layer that consists of a set of modular and extensible agent platforms that can be easily customised to each target applications needs.

• AF Deployment Process: An informal deployment process that facilitates the specification of agent system deployments, and supports the definition of both the configuration of each individual agent platform, and the initial distribution of the agent community.

• Development Kits: that provide necessary support for the development of specific types of agents based on individual agent architectures and programming languages.

A powerpoint presentation outlining details of Agent Factory can be found here. Further information on some of the current work that is being carried out on Agent Factory can be found on Rem Colliers blog.

Key Features

• Broadly compliant with the current FIPA Standards.

• Adopts a "Plug and Play" Philosophy that supports:
  • Deployment of multiple agent types potentially employing a diverse set of agent architectures and programming languages.
  • Configuration of multiple platform services within each agent platform, including Agent Management Services, and Message Transport Services.
  • Support for run-time debugging, logging, remote management, and visualisation tools.
  • Off the shelf application infrastructures that can be integrated into any agent application.

• Run-time is deployable on J2SE and J2ME CDC supported devices.

• Various prefabricated agent interpreters / architectures, including:
  • AFAPL: The original Agent Oriented Programming language for Agent Factory.
  • AFAPL2: An extended version of AFAPL that includes additional plan operators, roles, and goals.
  • ALPHA: Another variation of AFAPL that was developed as part of ongoing work applying Agent Factory to Robotics.
  • Reactive Message Agent Architecture: A simply reactive agent architecture that can be used to build agents that respond to messages.

• End-to-end support for agent development through the AFAPL2 Development Kit.

• The Agent Factory Debugger, an extensible debugging framework that can be customised to support multiple agent architectures and interpreters.

• Tool-based support integrated with well-established IDE's such as Eclipse and Netbeans.

Download

Agent Factory is an open source project that is available for download from SourceForge.