Agents of Things (AOT): Utilizing JADE Agent Technology as Communication Middleware for Vehicle Monitoring System

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) can be considered as a new concept that bears vast potentials as well as offering values in research studies, industrial advancements, and economical advantages. Various eminent features exist in this concept but is flawed in terms of intelligence, security, interoperability as well as availability. To solve the intelligent aspect of the concept, the existence of the concept of Agents of Things (AoT) came to fruition which utilizes software Agent technology in the concept of IoT. However, AoT is a work-in-progress concept as there are no real implementations yet. There exists technologies to implement mobile Agents. In this paper, we are looking into the communication aspects of a multi-agent system by utilizing JAVA Agent Development Framework (JADE) which will connect all the Agents for communication purposes. The system is based on the concept of Agents of Things (AoT). Agents are embedded in cars as well as the monitoring system, which continuously monitor and wait for a communication request from the cars' Agents. If an accident occurs, the Agents in the cars will communicate with the monitoring system and inform about it. This action triggers the monitoring system to contact authority and warn other vehicles heading towards the area where the accident happened. The main implementation step is installation of JADE container in devices that acts as a monitoring system. This serves as the communication hub for all Agents to connect. An application was developed and installed in portable devices (hand-phones) which act as vehicle Agents. The application has been tested and results show that the vehicle Agents can communicate with each other seamlessly and the required information (e.g. vehicle number and speed) can be transmitted successfully thus proving the concept of AoT.