AOS Published Papers and Technical Reports — Montreal 2001
Presented
at the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal,
Canada
JACK™– Summary of an Agent Infrastructure
by Nick Howden, Ralph Rönnquist, Andrew Hodgson and Andrew Lucas
Abstract and Introduction only
Intelligent Agents are being used for
simple rational
in a wide range of distributed applications. In particular, multi-agent
architectures based on the Belief-Desire-Intention model have been
used successfully in situations where
of human reasoning and team
are needed, such as simulating tactical decision-making in
operations and command and control structures. Other applications
include intelligent web applications, manufacturing control, telephone
call
and air traffic management.
The JACK™ framework by Agent Oriented Software
brings the concept of intelligent agents into the mainstream of commercial
software engineering and Java. JACK™ is a
third generation agent framework, designed as a set of lightweight
components with high performance and strong data typing.
We present the design approach and major technical characteristics
of JACK™, with a focus on some of the more
recent developments – modular structuring elements called Capabilities
and the team-based reasoning model called SimpleTeam. Two example
applications, in decision support and
simulation are described. Also, we discuss
the benefits of the component-based approach, both for the software
engineer developing sophisticated distributed applications, and
for the researcher exploring agent models and architectures.
1 Introduction
Intelligent Agents are being used for
simple rational
in a wide range of distributed applications. Intelligent agents have
received various, if not contradictory, definitions; by general consensus,
they must show some degree of autonomy, social ability, and combine
proactive and reactive
One of the better known and most successful architectures for agents
is the so-called BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) architecture, which
has seen a number of academic and industrial applications.
Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. (AOS), based in Melbourne, Australia,
has built JACK™, a framework in Java for multi-agent
system development. The company’s aim is to provide a platform
for commercial, industrial and research applications. To this end,
its framework supplies a high performance, lightweight implementation
of the BDI architecture, and can be easily extended to support different
agent models or specific application requirements. For brevity, we
will refer to JACK™ simply as "JACK".
This paper is
as follows. Section 2 introduces JACK™, presenting
the approach taken by AOS to its design, and outlining its major engineering
characteristics. The BDI model is discussed briefly in Section 3.
Sections 4 & 5 describe some of the more interesting components
of the JACK infrastructure and Section 6 gives some example applications
built with JACK™. The JACK components and
tools and the future research and development direction is described
in Sections 7 & 8. Finally, in Section 9 we discuss how the use
of this framework can be beneficial to both engineers and researchers.
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.
