Some issues and extensions of JADE to cope with multi-agent operation in the context of ambient intelligence

Abstract

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) can be taken as one of the principal test beds for the integration of Systems, Humans and Cybernetics. Multi-agent based Ambient Intelligence solutions have proliferated in the last few years in order to cope with the intrinsically distributed and complex interaction based nature of the problem. Different multi-agent platforms have been used in this regard, being JADE one of the standard solutions adopted due the variety of services it provides and to its FIPA compliance. Nevertheless, JADE was designed as a general Multi-agent platform and not for the particular demands of AmI systems. Consequently, its behavior in this realm is not as optimal as it could be. In this paper, we analyze some of the problems JADE presents for its application to AmI, especially in terms of communications, and describe some of the extensions we have developed in order to solve them. The resulting system exhibits enhanced communication capabilities, promotes the division of tasks into decoupled components and makes component reutilization easy. This platform constitutes an environment with tools for the development and deployment of AmI applications.