Welcome

The AgentService project is an effort to develop and mantain an agent oriented programming framework portable over all the operating systems hosting applications designed for the Common Language Infrastructure (also known as CLI). The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient, extensible, and modular environemnt to implement multi-agent systems, by following the specifications given by Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA).

So far the AgentService framework has been tested over different CLI runtimes: Mono, Microsoft .NET, and Shared Source CLI (SSCLI, aka Rotor).

The AgentService project is a property of l.i.d.o. and has been developed at the Department of Communication, Computer and System Sciences of the University of Genova.

Info - Coming Soon version 1.0

The AgentService Research Group is now hardly working to release a stable, bug free version of the AgentService platform. Check out this page and the home of the web site (Latest News) to know when the framework will be available for download.

Features

Definition of autonomous, independent and persistent agents: the agent model adopted in AgentService is based on the well-known agent programming paradigm, which indicates agents as autonomous and intelligent entities acting without external control and taking decisions depending on their knowledge and on the information acquired from interactions with other agents. This agent model is implemented through the use of behaviours, which dynamically build up the agent activity, and knowledge units constituting the agent state.

Concurrent execution of agents and their multi-behaviour activity: agents, taking advantages of the CLI, are executed in the so called Application Domains, and the one-to-one correspondence behaviour-thread was adopted. The adoption of this technological solution makes agents operate in a really isolated context through concurrent behaviours.

Persistence service for preserving the agent state: the information collected in the knowledge units of the agents can be persisted through the specific service of the platform.

Agent communication service based on message exchange: a communication module of AgentService provides agents with the ability to send and receive message, supporting also some conversation and filtering features.

White and Yellow Pages services: the FIPA compulsory components Directory Facilitator (DF) and Agent Management Service (AMS) are implemented as agent within the platform context. AgentService agents may register to DF to promote their services.

Resources

Documentation

The AgentService Research group is working to prepare a comprehensive documentation organized as follows:

• AgentService User's Guide: will mainly cover the use of the AgentService platform, the installation, the maintanenance, and the configuration of the platform.
• AgentService Programmer's Guide: will cover the internals of the AgentService platform, the implementation of modules for the platform, and all the details involved in each operation performed by the platform during its life cicle.

Tutorials

Tutorials will be ready when the framework will be available for download. Tutorials will mainly cover the implementation of agents for the framework.

Frequently Asked Questions

A FAQ section will be set up soon.