JADE: agents insights

Fabiano Dalpiaz

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) 2009-10

Java newbies

• The official Java tutorials are those by Sun

– http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

– http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/getStarted/index.html

– http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/java/index.html

• A useful resource is the Java resource portal

– https://javatutorials.dev.java.net/

• Further information can be found by searching in google (e.g. Java classes slides)

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

My first agent

• Creating a JADE agent is as simple as defining a class extending the jade.core.Agent class and implementing the setup() method as shown in the code below. The setup() method is intended to include agent initializations.

javac BookBuyerAgent.java

java jade.Boot -container buyer:BookBuyerAgent

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

My first agent: output

Output

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

Development environment

• The development of multi-agent systems with JADE does not require any development environment...

– … but a dev. environment can make development faster!

• JADE does not provide an official tool...

– … but non-official tools are available

– We suggest the usage of Eclipse with the plugin EJADE

• Main features (for AOSE course):

– 1-click agent deployment

– Launch/Shutdown RMA

– Specify startup parameters

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

Development environment

• Install the development environment

– Download ECLIPSE for JAVA developers

• http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

– Install ECLIPSE

– Download EJADE

• http://disi.unitn.it/~dnguyen/ejade/download.html

– Install EJADE: copy the folder it.fbk.sra.ejade_0.8.0 folder to the folder eclipse/plugins

– Run ECLIPSE

A ready-to-use version is provided in the labs

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

How Eclipse+EJADE looks like

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

A JADE project in Eclipse step-by-step

1) Create a JAVA project Add http.jar, iiop.jar, jade.jar, jadeTools.jar as External

Libraries

2) Set source attachments (to get contextual help)

– Download http://disi.unitn.it/~dalpiaz/files/jadesrc.zip Link all the field “Source attachment” to the zip file for all

the four external libraries

3) Create a class Extend jade.core.Agent Override the setup() and takeDown() method

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

Creating a new agent in Eclipse

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

Running a new agent

• Start the EJADE RMA

• Run the agent

– right click on the java file

– EJADE->deploy

F. Dalpiaz - AOSE 2009

Agent lifecycle

Passing arguments to agents

• Agents may get start-up arguments specified on the command line.

– These arguments can be retrieved, as an array of Object, by means of the getArguments() method of the Agent class.

– For example, let’s assume that the BookBuyerAgent gets the title of the book to buy as a command line argument.

Running an agent with parameters

Terminating an agent

• Agents terminate only when an explicit function is called

• Call an agent’s doDelete() to terminate an agent

• The takeDown() method is invoked just before an agent terminates and is intended to include agent clean-up operations.

Exercise 1: agent basics

• Create an agent MySecondAgent

• Handle parameter passing

– Input: two string parameters

– Print the first parameter

• Terminate the agent at the end of the setup()

– The agent prints the second parameter before termination

• Execute with EJADE

– Separate passed parameters with a space

Exercise 1: agent basics