Abstract
The computing industry has yet to take up agent technology as a new approach to software development. While other paradigms are supported by various tools, including generic IDEs, these are not well developed for agent-ware. Many agent platforms provide some form of IDE but these are platform-specific and are typically so tightly coupled to their agent platforms that they offer little re-use. There has been too little discussion about which tools an IDE should contain and few attempts to produce a generic IDE. In this paper, we identify two levels of abstraction requiring IDE tool support and draw on current research to categorise a set of generic tools for each level. We describe the reasons why existing MAS IDEs are coupled to their platforms and present an extendible software architecture which avoids this coupling. We build an IDE using this architecture and demonstrate its decoupling and extensibility by experimentation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bellifemine, F.L., Caire, G., Greenwood, D.: Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE. Wiley, Chichester (2007)
Benfield, S.S., Hendrickson, J., Galanti, D.: Making a Strong Business Case for Multiagent Technology. In: AAMAS, Hakodate, Japan. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Bernon, C., Cossentino, M., Pavon, J.: An Overview of Current Trends in European AOSE Research. Informatica 29, 379–390 (2005)
Bordini, R., Hübner, J.F., Vieira, R.: Jason and the golden fleece of agent-oriented programming. In: Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Platforms and Applications. Kluwer, Dordrecht (2005)
Bordini, R., Braubach, L., Dastani, M., Seghrouchni, A.E.F., Gomez-Sanz, J.J., Leite, J., O’Hare, G., Pokahr, A., Ricci, A.: A Survey of Programming Languages and Platforms for Multi-Agent Systems. Informatica 30(1), 33–44 (2006)
Braubach, L., Pokahr, A., Bade, D., Krempels, K., Lamersdorf, W.: Deployment of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems. In: Gleizes, M.-P., Omicini, A., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) ESAW 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3451, pp. 261–276. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Dastani, M., Meyer, J.C.: A Practical Agent Programming Language. In: Dastani, M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Ricci, A., Winikoff, M. (eds.) ProMAS 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4908. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Filho, A., Antonio do Prado, H., Pereira de Lucena, H., Pereira de Lucena, C.J.: A WSA-Based Architecture for Building Multi-Agent Systems. In: AAMAS, Hawaii (2007)
Flater, D.: Debugging agent interactions: a case study. In: ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Fonseca, S.P., Griss, M.L., Letsinger, R.: Agent Behavior Architectures: A MAS Framework Comparison. In: AAMAS, Bologna, Italy. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Gutknecht, O., Ferber, J., Michel, F.: Integrating Tools and Infrastructures for Generic Multi-Agent Systems. In: Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents, Montreal, Canada. ACM Press, New York (2001)
Lam, D.N., Barber, K.S.: Verifying and Explaining Agent Behaviour in an Implemented Agent System. In: AAMAS. ACM Press, New York (2004)
Luck, M., McBurney, P., Shehory, O., Willmott, S.: Agent Technology: Computing as Interaction (A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing), AgentLink (2005) ISBN 0854328459
Lynch, S.C., Rajendran, K.: Boris-A Framework for Developing Multi-Agent Systems in Lisp and Java. In: International Lisp User Group Meeting, New York, USA (2003)
Lynch, S.C., Rajendran, K.: Breaking Into Industry: Tool Support for Multiagent Systems. In: AAMAS, Hawaii (2007)
Massonet, P., Deville, Y., Neve, C.: From AOSE Methodology to Agent Implementation. In: AAMAS, Bologna, Italy. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Modi, P.J., Mancoridis, S., Mongan, W.M., Regli, W., Mayk, I.: Towards a reference model for agent-based systems. In: AAMAS, Japan. ACM Press, New York (2006)
Ndumu, D.T., Nwana, H.S., Lee, L.C., Collis, J.C.: Visualising and debugging distributed multi-agent systems. In: Conference on Autonomous Agents, Seattle, USA. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Poutakidis, D., Padgham, L., Winikoff, M.: Debugging Multi-Agent Systems Using Design Artifacts: The Case of Interaction Protocols. In: AAMAS, Bologna, Italy. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lynch, S., Rajendran, K. (2008). Providing Integrated Development Environments for Multi-Agent Systems. In: Bergmann, R., Lindemann, G., Kirn, S., Pěchouček, M. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5244. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87805-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87805-6_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87804-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87805-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)