Contents

The book consists of seven chapters. The assignment of papers to chapters has been a hard choice, since many papers fall into several categories. However, we believe the final layout is the most reasonable one.

The first three chapters (with eight papers altogether) present toolkits for the development of multi-agent systems. The toolkits are subdivided into three categories: platforms, development environments, and frameworks. An agent platform is intended as the set of middleware components supporting the development of (distributed) multi-agent applications. It provides all basic services, like agent life-cycle management, communication, tasks scheduling, security, etc., to easily initialize and run multi-agent systems. A development environment usually supports all phases in multi-agent system engineering, which comprises requirements engineering, system design, development and deployment. Agent frameworks provide a high-level programming environment consisting of a multi-agent system skeleton that allows the programmer to easily extend it to a full-fledged MAS application. Toolkits can also be differentiated according to their focus of support. In general, it is possible to distinguish between middleware- and reasoning-oriented systems. In this latter case, one emphasizes rationality and goal-directedness support for agent development.

The first chapter focuses on agent platforms and starts with the paper The JADE Platform and Experiences with Mobile MAS Applications by Fabio Bellifemine, Giovanni Caire, Giosu`e Vitaglione, Giovanni Rimassa, and Dominic Greenwood. JADE is a well-known and well-established Java-based and FIPA-compliant agent platform. The paper gives a comprehensive overview about the basic concepts of JADE. Furthermore, it shows how JADE can be...