Jadex: A BDI Reasoning Engine

Abstract

This chapter presents Jadex, a software framework for the creation of goal-oriented agents following the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model. The Jadex project aims to make the development of agent based systems as easy as possible without sacrificing the expressive power of the agent paradigm. The objective is to build up a rational agent layer that sits on top of a middleware agent infrastructure and allows for intelligent agent construction using sound software engineering foundations. Fostering a smooth transition from traditional distributed systems to the development of multi-agent systems, well established object-oriented concepts and technologies such as Java and XML are employed wherever applicable. Moreover, the Jadex reasoning engine tries to overcome traditional limitations of BDI systems by introducing explicit goals. This allows goal deliberation mechanisms being realized and additionally facilitates application development by making results from goal-oriented analysis and design easily transferable to the implementation layer. The system is freely available under LGPL license and provides extensive documentation as well as illustrative example applications.