The Implementation Of Development Framework For Applications Based On MAS

Agent-based computing as a novel software engineering paradigm has received more and more attention in constructing complex, distributed system for open network today. Researchers had proposed many agent-oriented analysis and design techniques and methodologies. But it is hard to master these techniques and methodologies, and this drawback brings difficulties to the designers with requirement and domain knowledge to design the system, and it also brings challenges to apply agent and MAS in the development of software.In the light of generative programming and engineering disciplines for grammarware, this paper presents an implementation of development framework for applications based on MAS, which is implemented on JADE platform, with combination of Agent based on blackboard and APL. First, Agent based on blackboard is implemented on JADE platform. For one thing, blackboard records and maintains data types, instances and relations that the application needs. The context that the agent runs in is updated when the context of blackboard changed. In this way, the agent can trigger and coordinate different knowledge source for different porposes. For another thing, with JADE's support of life cycle managment for agent, the framework implements the functionality of agent, as start, shutdown and service register etc, on JADE platform. At the same time, with JADE's support for communication between agents, the components for commincation implemented in agent with which agent can receive and handle messages received, and update blackboard with these messages. Then the context of agent running is reflected on blackboard.Second, the APL grammar is enhanced in expressing plans and goals for agents. With APL the designers can not only decribe the data types, instances and relations in the scenario, but also describe plans for different goals with FSM, or decribe actions to construct the plans, from which agents can generate plans in execution. The content expressed in APL is finally parsed by a parser in agent to generate content on blackboard or components in agents.At last an application scenario is used to illustrate how to develop an application with the framework, including describing scenario with APL, parsing APL into executable code on JADE, and plan process for various goals. With the help of framework, system designers can model application scenarioes with APL, and then the generated APL files are parsed into executeble code on JADE. In this way, applications based on MAS are develeoped in a top-down manner with the support provided by JADE, and the develop efficiency is improved.