Agents are entities that have knowledge, goals, plans and varying degrees of intelligence. As an example you may envisage agents programmed for electronic commerce applications, or as personal assisstants, negotiating times and dates of meetings or deputising for their owners in auctions.
In order to satisfy their goals and make their plans feasible such agents often need to communicate with other agents. This communication may be of the form of negotiation, for example to agree on exchange of resources, or prices for selling commodities, or for exchange of tasks. The communication can also be aimed at acquiring or giving information. Each agent may have only a partial view of the world they need to operate in, and they have to find out other information from other agents in that world. They may know which of their fellow agents are more reliable and more timely in their responses, and they may make ues of this information if forming strategies for communicating with other agents.
The project involves programming such agents using a java-based freely available tool called Jade. This is a middle-ware which provides some facilities to develop software agents. It provides an agent platform, which includes graphical user interfaces for the management of agent status, communication between agents --possibly on different hosts (visualisation tool, predefined communicative acts and protocols), registration of agents, naming service, etc. Importantly, all these services follow the requirements stated by the FIPA specifications, which are international standards.
The project will identify a test-bed application, design agents with appropriate levels of intelligence and communication strategies for the application and provide implementation and experimentation using Jade.
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