The first twenty years of agent-based software development with JADE
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(2020) 34:36
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The first twenty years of agent‑based software development with JADE Federico Bergenti1 · Giovanni Caire2 · Stefania Monica1 · Agostino Poggi3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract A recent survey provides convincing evidence that JADE is among the most widely used tools to develop agent-based software systems. It finds application in industrial settings and to support research, and it has been used to introduce students to software agents in various universities. This paper offers a perspective on the current state of JADE by first presenting a chronicle of the relevant events that contributed to make JADE what it is today. Then, this paper enumerates some of the abstractions that JADE helped to identify and that are now commonly adopted in the community of researchers and practitioners interested in software agents and agent-based software development. Such abstractions have been successfully applied to construct relevant software systems, and among them, this paper reports on a mission-critical system that uses the abstractions that JADE contributed to identify to serve millions of users every day. Finally, this paper discusses an outlook on the near future of JADE by sketching a recent project that could contribute to provide a new perspective on the use of JADE. Keywords JADE · Agent-oriented software engineering · Software agents
* Federico Bergenti [email protected] Giovanni Caire [email protected] Stefania Monica [email protected] Agostino Poggi [email protected] 1
Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Fisiche e Informatiche, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 53/A, 43124 Parma, Italy
2
TIM – Innovation, Via Reiss Romoli 274, 10148 Turin, Italy
3
Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Architettura, Università degli Studi di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 181/A, 43124 Parma, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
36
Page 2 of 19
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(2020) 34:36
1 Introduction The Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) (e.g., [5]) consists of the well-known framework to build software agents together with some tools needed to effectively operate agent-based software systems. JADE has been offered to the open-source community of Java developers through its official Web site [43] for more than twenty years. A recent survey [44] provides convincing evidence that JADE is still among the most widely used tools to develop agent-based software systems in various contexts. The results of the survey clearly show that JADE has been intensively used in the academia to support research on software agents and to introduce students to Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) [13]. In addition, JADE has been successfully used in industrial projects all over the world, as documented in another recent survey [51] that focuses on the practical applications of software agents and agent-based software development. Besides its applications to the relevant contexts mentioned above,
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