Light Weight Intelligent Software Agents in Simulation
by Paolo Busetta, Ralph Rönnquist, Andrew Hodgson and Andrew
Lucas
Abstract only
Today Intelligent Agents are being used for
human
in simulation. In particular, powerful Belief-Desire-Intention agents
have been used successfully in air operations simulations where
of human reasoning has been needed to simulate tactical decision making
and command and control structures.
However, Intelligent Agent frameworks have so far been large, monolithic
software systems. With their origins in research on Distributed Artificial
Intelligence, these frameworks have generally been developed as research
environments in the research laboratory. Consequently they have been
unduly complex to use, as well as expensive and difficult to integrate
as components of larger systems.
The JACK™ framework presented in this paper
brings the concept of intelligent agents into the mainstream of software
engineering. JACK is a third generation agent framework, designed
to be lightweight, with high performance, and strong typing. It merges
the Intelligent Agent concept with the object-oriented Java language,
and is designed for building agents for simulation.
We discuss the advantages of having Agents as lightweight components
for simulation, and of defining these agents in a mainstream object-oriented
language.
Introduction
Intelligent Agents are being used for
simple rational
in a wide range of distributed applications, including simulation.
There are however, various, if not contradictory, definitions of intelligent
agent. By general consensus, it is a type of software that shows some
degree of autonomy and social ability, and combines proactive and
reactive
(Wooldridge & Jennings 1995). One of the better known and most successful
paradigms for intelligent agents is the BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention)
architecture, which has seen a number of academic and industrial applications,
including military simulation of both independent and cooperative
entities.
Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. (AOS), based in Melbourne, Australia,
has built JACK™ , which is a framework in
Java for multi-agent system development. The company's aim is to provide
a platform for commercial, industrial and research applications; one
of the most important is simulation, in particular, for
and other domains
by a large number of entities showing sophisticated
JACK supplies a high performance, lightweight implementation of the
BDI architecture as an extension of its host language, Java, and can
easily support additional agent models and specific application requirements.
In the following, we discuss intelligent agents in the context of
simulation. We introduce JACK and present the BDI architecture it
currently supports. We give an overview of application development
with JACK and conclude with an analysis of the benefits it provides.
New in Jack v5.0:
The JACK Development Environment (JDE) has been extended to provide
the ability to trace execution using JACK Design Diagrams.
After configuring the JDE to trace certain diagrams, it can connect to a running JACK™ application and when any transitions occur that match links in the diagram, they will be highlighted.
