28,266 research outputs found
Analysis and design of multiagent systems using MAS-CommonKADS
This article proposes an agent-oriented methodology called MAS-CommonKADS and develops a case study. This methodology extends the knowledge engineering methodology CommonKADSwith techniquesfrom objectoriented and protocol engineering methodologies. The methodology consists of the development of seven models: Agent Model, that describes the characteristics of each agent; Task Model, that describes the tasks that the agents carry out; Expertise Model, that describes the knowledge needed by the agents to achieve their goals; Organisation Model, that describes the structural relationships between agents (software agents and/or human agents); Coordination Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between software agents; Communication Model, that describes the dynamic relationships between human agents and their respective personal assistant software agents; and Design Model, that refines the previous models and determines the most suitable agent architecture for each agent, and the requirements of the agent network
Accessing files in an Internet: The Jade file system
Jade is a new distribution file system that provides a uniform way to name and access files in an internet environment. It makes two important contributions. First, Jade is a logical system that integrates a heterogeneous collection of existing file systems, where heterogeneous means that the underlying file systems support different file access protocols. Jade is designed under the restriction that the underlying file system may not be modified. Second, rather than providing a global name space, Jade permits each user to define a private name space. These private name spaces support two novel features: they allow multiple file systems to be mounted under one directory, and they allow one logical name space to mount other logical name spaces. A prototype of the Jade File System was implemented on Sun Workstations running Unix. It consists of interfaces to the Unix file system, the Sun Network File System, the Andrew File System, and FTP. This paper motivates Jade's design, highlights several aspects of its implementation, and illustrates applications that can take advantage of its features
Building a Truly Distributed Constraint Solver with JADE
Real life problems such as scheduling meeting between people at different
locations can be modelled as distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems
(CSPs). Suitable and satisfactory solutions can then be found using constraint
satisfaction algorithms which can be exhaustive (backtracking) or otherwise
(local search). However, most research in this area tested their algorithms by
simulation on a single PC with a single program entry point. The main
contribution of our work is the design and implementation of a truly
distributed constraint solver based on a local search algorithm using Java
Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) to enable communication between agents on
different machines. Particularly, we discuss design and implementation issues
related to truly distributed constraint solver which might not be critical when
simulated on a single machine. Evaluation results indicate that our truly
distributed constraint solver works well within the observed limitations when
tested with various distributed CSPs. Our application can also incorporate any
constraint solving algorithm with little modifications.Comment: 7 page
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