TABLE OF CONTENTS Michael Zapf
Abstract. AMETAS is a Java-based environment for creating and running mobile, autonomous agents. Some of its characteristic aspects are the 3-tier-oriented structure of applications, the restriction to pure message passing between the components, the security subsystem, and the flexible mediation subsystem which may employ declarative type descriptions for finding agents. In this article we will provide details about these aspects, also including application notes.
Keywords. Mobile autonomous agents, message passing, type system, security.
AMETAS, an acronym for Asynchronous message transfer agent system was created at the University of Frankfurt as a platform for exploring concepts for agent type systems. Since 2002, AMETAS is distributed by the company accsis GmbH [1].
The latest versions of AMETAS requires the use of a Java Runtime Environment 1.4 or higher. All applications written for AMETAS are created within Java, including features like JNI (Java native interface) for specific solutions beyond the capabilities of pure Java programming.
The main target of AMETAS is not to provide an environment for lean, highly efficient, mobile agents. Instead, the system encourages a definite notion of agent-oriented software engineering which puts emphasis on the autonomy of each part of a multi-agent application.
AMETAS does not require agents to implement specific patterns of behavior, and it does not provide auxiliary components for supporting deductive algorithms for distributed problem solving. This does
